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LETTER 



TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE SOUTHERN 
INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 



X 



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LETTER 



A WHIG MEMBER OF THE SOUTHERN 
INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 



By GOLDWIN SMITH. 




^FCO}^. 




U.S.A. 



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BOSTON: 

TICKNOR AND FIELDS 

18 64. 



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AUTHOR S EDITION, FROM ADVANCE SHEETS. 



University Press: 

Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 

Cambridge. 



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My dear 



You and I have some political principles in 
common, and there is therefore no absurdity in my attempt- 
ing to reason with you on a political question as to which 
we happen to differ. Your Association wishes this country 
to lend assistance to the Slave-owners of the Southern States, 
in their attempt to effect a disruption of the American Com- 
monwealth, and to establish an independent Power, having, 
as they declare, Slavery for its corner-stone. I am one of 
those who are convinced that in doing so she would commit 
a great folly and a still greater crime, the consequences of 
which would in the end fall on her own head. If you were 
an enemy to free institutions, and a lover of " Slavery, Sub- 
ordination, and Government," I should at once understand 
your position, and despair of moving you from it by any 
arguments of mine. But as you are a friend to free institu- 
tions, at least up to the measure of 1688, 1 do not so entirely 
despair of offering you such reasons as may at least induce 
you to hesitate before you plunge your country into an 
American war. For it is towards war that you are now 
driving. You are doing your utmost to facilitate the escape 
of the Confederate iron-clads from the Mersey. One of the 
most eminent of your number has given notice of a motion 
in Parliament, evidently having this end in view. And if 



6 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

these vessels are allowed to go out, you do not doubt, I pre- 
sume, that there will be war. Indeed, you must be conscious 
that bare recognition, the ostensible object of your Associa- 
tion, would be futile, or rather would enrage the Federals, 
and determine them to persevere. Suppose Ireland were in 
rebellion, what effect would the recognition of the insurgent 
government by a foreign power, say France, produce on the 
temper of the English nation ? Would it make us more 
wilhng to yield the victory to the insurgents, and to acqui- 
esce in the disruption of our empire ? 

The course taken by the Government has unfortunately 
been such as to give the attempts of your Southern friends 
and their allies to embroil us with the Federals a very fair 
chance of success. They have declined to take their stand 
on the firm ground of international duty, which plainly for- 
bids us, as professed neutrals, to allow either belligerent to 
make our shores the base of his maritime operations, and 
have taken their stand instead on the ground of municipal 
law, which is wholly irrelevant as between nations, while, at 
the same time, they have shrunk from amending the muni- 
cipal law in the manner required in order to render it equal 
to the present need. The consequence is, apparently, that 
only the law's delay (a most humiliating protection) is now 
interposed between us and a calamity which even those who 
are doing their best to bring it on us, would almost fear 
to name. 

You perhaps think that because the Americans have 
already a war upon their hands, they will tamely see their 
ships burned and their commerce destroyed by vessels cruis- 
ing from the ports of an ally. If the Commonwealth has 
men of spirit, and men who know their duty, at her head, 
rather than see her suffer such dishonor, they will see her 
in an honorable grave. But, judging from experience, I 
think you much miscalculate the habits of nations when they 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 7 

are once roused to a certain ' pitch of frenzy by a desperate 
struggle for existence. The French RepubUc, when we 
attacked her, had two great mihtary powers already on her 
hands. She was besides bankrupt and torn by civil war. 
Yet she was ready to fly at the throat of another enemy. 
And the victory over the revolutionary levies of a nation 
driven to despair, which seemed so sure and easy, cost us, as 
we know, twenty years of war. 

Let me first tell you why it is that I feel the interest 
which I do not wish to disguise in the fortunes of the Com- 
monwealth which you are so anxious to break up. It is not 
from a fanatical love of what are commonly called Repub- 
lican institutions, or from a desire precipitately to " Ameri- 
canize" any country which is not yet ripe for the largest 
measure of self-government. A man must have read history 
to very little purpose if he has not learned that political 
institutions must vary according to the character, intelli- 
gence, and social condition of a nation; and that all are 
equally beneficent after their kind, which at a given time, 
and under given circumstances, suit the requirements of the 
people. Would that our statesmen, who turn Indian Zem- 
indars into squires, and press upon the untrained Greeks a 
parody of the English Constitution, were a little more con- 
scious of this great truth. The Americans, for their part, 
seem not wholly unconscious of it. Though Republicans 
themselves, they show no fanatical hatred of our monarchy. 
They receive the heir to the English throne with demonstra- 
tions of enthusiastic affection, and I believe Queen Victoria 
reigns in their hearts as completely as she does in ours. 

Indeed, if my heart were set upon a republic of the clas- 
sical kind, — the repubhc of Brutus and Cassius and the 
debating-clubs, — I should look for it in the seceding States, 
or anywhere rather than in a land of political equality and 
SQcial justice. The classical republics were based on Slav- 



8 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

ery : the political character of their citizens was that of 
a dominant caste maintained in proud idleness by the labor 
of servile hands : and this character is avowedly imitated by 
the Southerns, though more successfully in point of courage 
and military vigor than in point of cultivation and refinement. 
I wonder it has never occurred to those who were exulting 
over the failure of republican institutions, and in the same 
breath lauding the political greatness of the South, that the 
South also is a republic, with exactly the same constitution 
as the North in all essential respects, saving the article which 
prohibits the Southern Congress from passing any law deny- 
ing or impairing the right of property in negro slaves. 

My reason for feeling a deep interest in the American 
Commonwealth is this : It seems to me that the aim of all 
social effort, and the object of all social aspiration, is to pro- 
duce a real community, every member of which shall fully 
share the fruits and benefits of the social union. I say this 
in no communistic or revolutionary sense, but in the sense 
in which it must be felt to be true by all, whether Liberals 
or Conservatives, who are trying to improve the condition 
of the poor, and especially by those who are doing so in 
obedience to the social principles laid down in the Gospel. 
Such is the goal to which the progress of society, through 
all its various and successive phases, would seem to be tend- 
ing, if it is tending to any goal at all, and is not a mere blind 
and aimless current. That English society in its present 
state is very far from having reached tliis goal, is what you 
will scarcely think it Jacobinical to assert. It is an open 
question among writers on economical history whether the 
mass of the peasantry in this country have really shared at 
all in the increase of wealth and comfort which has accrued 
to the upper classes in the course of the last three hundred 
years. No one will venture to say that they have shared in 
anything like a fair proportion. Too many of them are still 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 9 

in a state of great misery, of brutal ignorance, and of the 
vice which misery and ignorance always bring in their train. 
Millions of our laboring population live constantly in view 
of penal pauperism, and nearly a milHon of them on the 
average are actually paupers. They pass through life with- 
out hope : they die in destitution : the only haven of their 
old age, after a life of toil, is the workhouse. In most cot- 
tages of many counties the children are under fed that the 
father may have enough to work upon : and any physician 
who has been much among the poor will tell you that num- 
bers of them die in their infancy from want of proper food 
and clothing. In Ireland, centuries of horrors to which, I 
say most deliberately, history affords no parallel, seem to be 
closing in the expatriation of a people. There is wealth, 
luxury, and splendor, such as perhaps the world never saw, 
in the palaces of our nobles and our wealthy merchants and 
stockbrokers : but there is hunger, and the horrible diseases 
that wait on hunger, at the palace gates. Pass from the 
dwellings of the rich to those of the poor, and you will own, 
that though we may be a great and powerful nation, a com- 
munity in the full sense of the term we are not. These 
things are freely stated and even exaggerated by Conserva- 
tive writers whose object it is to disparage the present in 
honor of the past ; and I do not see why it should be trea- 
son to state them when the object is to prevent the same 
party from destroying the opening prospects of the future. 

While the mass of the people have so little interest in the 
existing state of things, and while they are at the same time 
so wanting in the education and intelligence requisite for the 
exercise of political rights, our statesmen naturally shrink 
from giving them the franchise : though all of us, even the 
strongest Conservatives, are conscious that it is not a just or 
sound system under which the bulk of the community, while 
they bear all political burdens, while they pay heavy taxes 
1* 



10 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

and shed their blood for the country in war, are excluded 
from all political rights. A fraction of our citizens (if it is 
not a mockery to use the term) enjoy the franchise. The 
rest enjoy what even the leader of the Conservative party 
has derided as the ironical franchise of " virtual represen- 
tation " ; that is to say, they are left in the hands of classes 
whose interests are often quite different from theirs. Great 
progress has been made since the Middle Ages in every 
respect, except perhaps the more romantic qualities, among 
the upper classes of society : but the condition of the unen- 
franchised laborer, if you look at the real facts, instead of 
being satisfied with the mere name of freeman, is little 
above that of the mediaeval villain. He is even still, under 
the Law of Settlement, in some measure bound to the soil. 

No man who loves his kind, and feels that his own happi- 
ness depends on the happiness of his fellows, can desire that 
such a state of things should be final. No man of sense and 
reflection, I believe, imagines that it will be so. 

Now, in the American Commonwealth, partly I grant by 
the bounty of nature and the lavish fertility of a virgin 
world, but partly also, I think, by institutions, especially by 
those regulating the distribution of land, and by the thorough 
diffusion of popular education, one portion at least of these 
evils, the poverty of the masses, has been to a great extent 
removed. The laborer in America, in a material point of 
view at least, is prosperous and happy. He is the possessor 
of property : he has no fear of dying in the workhouse, or 
of seeing starvation and destitution round his death-bed. If 
he is industrious and frugal, he has all the world before him ; 
and however ambitious he may be, however high he may 
look, hope still cheers him on, for he sees one of his own 
class in the foremost office of the state. This you will say 
is a coarse happiness, falling far short of high civilization. 
Still it is something, as the world moves slowly, and it is the 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 11 

basis of all the rest : for though man does not live by bread 
alone, he must have bread to live. Property confers dignity 
and self-respect : the hope of rising in the world sustains 
frugality and self-denial : the removal of physical misery 
stanches the greatest source of crime. Of the fact that the 
laborer is more prosperous in the Free States than in this coun- 
try, and that one step in the improvement of man's lot has 
at least been gained, the vast emigration from this country 
to America, which continues unabated in the midst of civil 
war, is in itself a conclusive proof. The number of emi- 
grants will go far towards making up to the North for the 
loss of life in the war, at least according to a rational esti- 
mate of that loss, though not according to the estimate of pub- 
lic instructors, who, to produce a budget of gratifying horrors, 
set down all the soldiers whose term has expired as killed. 

As to the political part of the grand experiment : before 
we estimate its result, we must in fairness make allowance 
for some heavy drawbacks. "We must make allowance for 
the violent bias towards the democratic side given to the 
States, at the outset of their career as a nation, by their 
struggle for freedom against the monarchy and aristocracy 
of this country. We must make allowance, as I believe, 
for some mistakes committed by the founders of the Consti- 
tution under the influence of European prejudices, especially 
the institution of an elective President, as the republican 
counterpart of a king ; which, though it has accidentally 
been of great service in this extremity, by giving the nation 
a sort of constitutional dictator, is, under ordinary circum- 
stances, a dangerous stimulant to senseless faction and per- 
sonal ambition. We must make allowance for the turbid 
tide of wretchedness and ignorance which is poured into the 
American community by the government of this country, 
and with which, I think, candor must allow that American 
institutions have dealt wonderfully well. We must make 



12 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

allowance for the want of that experience from which we 
received many a severe and chastening lesson before our 
political character was moulded, and which the Americans 
are now undergoing, for the first time, in a stern form. 
Above all, we must make allowance for the presence of 
Slavery, shooting moral and political poison through every 
vein of the State ; and for the influence of the fell alliance 
between the Slave-owning Aristocracy of the South and 
the Democratic party in the North, — a tyranny, deliver- 
ance from which would be well purchased even at the price 
of a civil war. No doubt there have been great evils and 
gross absurdities in American politics. There has been 
factiousness, though, perhaps, scarcely greater than that of 
our own political parties, under their historic and aristo- 
cratic leaders, in the matter of Parliamentary Reform ; there 
has been corruption, though, I fear, not worse than there 
was in our own legislature, when the holders of political 
power, peers as well as commoners, were selling their sup- 
port to railroads ; there has been a flux of Parliamentary 
rhetoric, less refined, certainly, and possibly less instructive, 
than the debates of our own House of Commons ; there has 
been demagogism of a very repulsive kind, though, if it 
were not an ungracious task, it would be easy to show, by 
examples on this side of the water, that aristocracies have 
their demagogues as well as mobs. As to journalism, the 
New York Herald is always kept before our eyes ; but the 
New York Herald is not the American press : and I most 
firmly believe that neither this nor any other American 
journal ever pandered to the violence of the rowdies more 
vilely, either in point of virulence or mendacity, than a 
great English journal has pandered to the hatred of America 
among the upper classes of this country during the present 
war. Some of us at least have been taught by what we 
have lately seen not to shrink from an extension of the suf- 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 13 

frage, if the only bad consequence of that measure of jus- 
tice would be a change in government from the passions 
of a privileged class to the passions of the people. 

After all, the American Commonwealth has, in part at 
least, solved a great problem for humanity. The full rights 
of citizenship have been conferred on a whole people ; a 
real community has been called into being : and yet order 
and property are, as the rapid increase of wealth proves, 
at least tolerably secure. American institutions have re- 
ceived that which is the best practical stamp of excellence, 
— the loyal attachment of a perfectly free people ; and we 
have learned what, considering the doubtful aspect of polit- 
ical affairs in Europe, all who are unbiassed by class preju- 
dices w^ill be glad to learn, that society may repose on liberty 
as a sure foundation, and that the people, when moderately 
educated, will obey authority which they have themselves 
bestowed, and reverence laws which they have themselves 
enacted. The American Government calls upon its citizens 
for the tribute of their blood ; and that tribute is not with- 
held. The charge of carrying on the war with Irish and 
German mercenaries is cast upon the Federals by an aristoc- 
racy whose armies have been filled both with Irish decoyed 
into an alien service, and with mercenary Germans bought 
like cattle for the shambles. But the commissariat and the 
military hospitals of the North are of themselves enough to 
show that the war is not being waged with vile and merce- 
nary lives. If you wish to know the signs of a war waged 
wdth vile and mercenary lives, read, wdth attention to the 
hospital and commissariat details, the mihtary history of 
the European powers, — of Austria, of Russia, even of Eng- 
land, till something of a democratic spirit arose and enforced 
regard for the soldier as well as for the general. Recollect 
the treatment of our sailors which brought on the mutiny of 
the Nore. The American soldiers are highly paid, no doubt ; 



14 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

but wages in their country are very high, and they are fight- 
ing without medals or ribbons, and without the lash. There 
has been a good deal of drafting ; but there are also a great 
many volunteers : and, on the whole, the armies are, to a 
great extent, citizen armies, such as no Government not 
deeply rooted in the affections of the people could have at 
its command. 

Military power is commonly thought a great test — by 
some the greatest test — of the excellence of political insti- 
tutions. If this be so, American institutions must be entitled 
to some respect. For I believe no nation in history has 
ever, by its own resources, kept armies so large, so well ap- 
pointed, and so well supplied, for so long a time in the field. 
Nor has there been any signal break down, like that of Bal- 
aclava, in the mihtary administration, though the scale of 
operations has been so colossal, and the field of war so vast. 
It is true that private zeal has come to the aid of the Govern- 
ment, especially in the hospital department ; but this is a 
part, and a very striking part, of the political system ; and 
you will observe that in this case it is loyal co-operation, not 
ambitious and disloyal rivalry like the Crimean Fund of the 
Times. Military skill and discipline are not created in a day 
among a people devoted to peaceful industry, and brought 
up in a freedom and equality which unfit them for the com- 
mand and the obedience of the camp. But these qualities 
seem to have arisen with reasonable speed. I doubt whether 
Europe could show a nobler soldier in any point of military 
character or duty than General Grant, who declines to come 
forward for the Presidency against Mr. Lincoln, because, if 
he did so, he would be placed for six months in a position 
of rivalry towards his superior in command. "With Meade, 
Rosecranz, Banks, Thomas, Sherman, Grierson, Gilmore, 
Dahlgren, Farragut, and others who could be named, little 
fault is to be found : and how many great commanders did 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 15 

England produce under the aristocratic system, during the 
first five years of the Revolutionary war? The practical 
result is that half of the task which European soldiers and 
statesmen pronounced impossible has been accomplished, 
and the remainder brought at least within the limits of pos- 
sibility. So far I think you must go with me. I do not ex- 
pect you to go with me in saying that the nation as a whole 
— particular cases of misconduct, failure, or folly being set 
aside — has shown during this struggle, at least during the 
latter part of it, and since adversity has laid her chastening 
and elevating hand upon the people, the true, though rugged 
lineaments of greatness. It has risen after terrible defeat 
elastic and indomitable. In its darkest hour, though its lan- 
guage, like ours, was querulous and desponding, it has not 
lost confidence in itself. It has not lost even a kind of grim 
good humor, the sign of a strong heart. It has wisely stood 
by its Government, though its Government was not always 
wise ; and has not passed votes of want of confidence against 
Ministers just struggling out of their early difiiculties in the 
middle of a war. It has quelled party spirit, strong as the 
party spirit there is, in face of the common enemy, with a com- 
pleteness which fills its enemies here with impotent and ridic- 
ulous rage. It has gone forward, or is now going forward, and 
bearing its Government forward with it, as one man, with a 
unity which I believe has scarcely ever been equalled in his- 
tory, except perhaps in the case of the French Republic, 
where it was produced by Terror. We have always been 
told that the men of intellect and refinement in America stood 
aloof from politics in sullen disaffection : but during this strug- 
gle they have equalled or surpassed the rest of the community 
in devotion to the common cause, and to the " rail-splitter " 
who is its constitutional chief. The President himself was 
chosen out of the mass by the ordinary method of election, 
not called forth to meet a terrible emergency ; yet he has 



16 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

met the most terrible of all emergencies with sense and self- 
possession, as well probably on the whole as it would have 
been met by any European sovereign or statesman whom 
you could name. Military merit, whether of the President's 
party, or, as in the cases of Grant and McClellan, of the 
party opposed to his, has been promptly recognized and 
heartily supported. No commander has been removed till 
he had really failed, in which case commonwealths consider 
the safety of the soldier as well as the feelings of the gen- 
eral : and (which is a very significant and noble trait) those 
who have been removed, after failure, from supreme com- 
mand, have for the most part continued to serve the govern- 
ment of their country loyally, cheerfully, and well, in a sub- 
ordinate position. Personal ambition and personal rivalry 
have in the main been held in check by the public good ; 
and the cause and the commonwealth have been supreme. 
At the outset there was a frightful amount both of corrup- 
tion and of treason : but, as it seems to me, both have a good 
deal abated as the struggle has gone on, and as the face of 
the people has grown sterner. All wars breed contractors ; 
and if you wish to see that commercial selfishness and cov- 
etousness are not confined to America, you have only to look 
at the great English shipbuilders, who are ready to plunge 
their country into a dishonorable war rather than lose a cus- 
tomer and forego the addition of a few thousands to their 
already enormous wealth. Great emergencies bring out 
without disguise all that is noble and all that is base in 
man: and the baseness is apt to appear first. 

The worst part of the case, and that of which the aspect is 
in all respects most sinister, undoubtedly is the finance ; as to 
which it can only be said that the burden laid upon posterity 
is not so heavy, especially when regard is had to the bound- 
less resources of the country, as that which has been laid by 
other Governments for objects in which posterity had infi- 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 17 

nitely less concern ; and that the nation will probably be helped 
through this, as it has been helped through other difficulties, 
by the strong sense of a common interest which pervades all 
its members, and by the cordiality with which, at need, it 
supports a Government which is not separate from it and 
above it, but an embodiment of itself. 

If you do not go with me in thinking that the Americans 
have shown military greatness, still less, I fear, will you go 
with me in thinking that their attachment to freedom has 
stood the strain of civil war. You are probably convinced 
that liberty has given way either to an anarchy or to a 
tyranny, though you scarcely know to which. The corre- 
spondent of the Times, as that journal assures us, has been 
living under a reign of terror unparalleled in history ; unpar- 
alleled certainly, since under no previous reign of terror has 
a man been able to publish, with perfect freedom and in per- 
fect safety, the most violent and calumnious denunciations of 
the terrorist Government. The tacit consent of the nation 
has placed in the hands of the President extraordinary 
powers for the suppression of the treason with which, at first, 
the North swarmed, while the enemy was at the gates of the 
capital. Those powers have, in some cases, been arbitrarily 
used. But, generally speaking, personal liberty has been 
secure to a degree unequalled, I venture to assert, in so fear- 
ful an extremity ; to a greater degree than it was here 
under Pitt, in an extremity far less fearful : to as great a 
degree, to say the least, as it is now under the Italian Gov- 
ernment, which, under the pressure of similar necessity, has 
assumed similar powers, and is in like manner charged with 
the most tyrannical atrocities by the enemies of the Italian 
cause, and the friends of the Bourbon despotism and its 
dungeons. The tyrant Lincoln, though " worse than Robes- 
pierre," will very likely be re-elected President by the free 
suffrages (you will scarcely deny that they are free) of the 



18 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

oppressed people, or of so many of tliem as have survived his 
guillotine. The exercise of political rights in all the States 
not under military occupation has been unrestrained ; the best 
proof of which is, that at one time the elections went very 
much against the Government. As to the Constitution, it 
has never been in danger for a moment, except in the eyes 
of the Southern party here, whose v/ishes fathered the strange 
thought that McClellan of all men in the world was going to 
play the part of Bonaparte ; and the disappointment of all 
such expectations, when they had been so confidently ex- 
pressed, and seemed so well warranted by the analogy of 
European history, must be taken as a proof that, in the judg- 
ment of its enemies, the love of liberty among the Americans 
is strong, and capable of resisting forces which have ship- 
wrecked the liberties of other nations. The truth is, that 
beneath the troubled and unhealthy surface of general politics 
there has always been at work the quiet and healthy influence 
of the local institutions, which have really formed the polit- 
ical character of the people. There has been no tendency up 
to this time to lapse into sabre sway ; the soldiers have 
retained apparently all the sentiments of citizens ; and the 
President Commander-in-Chief has grasped at the first op- 
portunity of restoring civil government in Louisiana and the 
other States won from the Confederates ; a proceeding for 
which he is, of course, denounced by those who had just 
before been railing at him for attempting, as they said, to 
overthrow civil government, and to rule by the sword. But 
he has probably learnt by this time that it is vain for him to 
aspire to the approval of the editor of the Times, and that he 
must look for the sanction of his measures to his conscience 
and his country. And the name of the editor of the Times 
reminds me that the anarchical despotism of the American 
press, of which we have heard so much, has proved not to be 
above reasonable control. We have seen nothing like the 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 19 

Times's expedition to Sebastopol, or the editor's letter to Sir 
Charles Napier, ordering him to attack a fortress which was 
pronounced impregnable by the most daring of living seamen. 
The generals have also been allowed, feverishly anxious as 
the people were for news, to put a tolerable check on the 
revelations of newspaper correspondents. This ungovern- 
able nation has shown at need strong instincts of government 
and sufficient powers of self-control. I see no reason for dis- 
claiming kinship with these people. So far as I can discern, 
they are true Anglo-Saxons in a burning vessel, between sea 
and fire, fiercely agitated, of course, but still masters of them- 
selves. 

Perhaps nothing has practically done the Americans more 
harm, in the opinion of this country, than the want of taste 
shown in their documents and speeches. When men are 
fiercely excited, their language is apt to correspond to their 
emotions ; and the postures of a nation wrestling for life are 
not likely to be regulated by the rules of grace. Besides 
this, however, taste is the prerogative of high education, such 
as falls to the lot, even in this country, of the wealthier 
class alone : and the education of the Americans is notori- 
ously rather general than high. Their energies hitherto 
have been employed in reclaiming a vast wilderness, and 
laying the solid foundations on which we have no reason to 
doubt that a graceful superstructure will hereafter be reared. 
We have no reason to doubt this, I say, since already there 
exists — not indeed in the Slave States, which in this respect 
seem hopelessly barbarous, but in the Free States — a liter- 
ature of high value in all departments, as well as eminently 
pure. In practical inventions the Americans are supreme : 
and they are most ready to borrow from us the fruits of pure 
intellect, which they will one day perhaps return with inter- 
est. Our great writers, who look so coldly on them now, 
and whose coldness they feel so keenly, have only to go 



20 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

among them to discover that want of respect for intellectual 
eminence is not among their faults. The beginnings of all 
civilization are deficient in refinement : those of the feudal 
civilization, in which we still linger, were coarse enough ; 
and surely it would be fastidiousness with a vengeance to 
reject or attack the real cause of humanity on the mere 
ground of want of taste in its defenders. As to boastful- 
ness, it is highly oflfensive and generally indicative of weak- 
ness. The Americans doubtless needed such a lesson as 
they have received to cure them of it, as well as of other 
tendencies which are incident to unalloyed prosperity. But 
are we ourselves free from it ? Is it not exactly the fault of 
which all the world accuses us .^ What are the Russian guns 
planted before the towns of this country but boastfulness ; 
and boastfulness, to tell the truth, of a rather ignoble kind ? 
By what else than appeals to that which, in the case of the 
Americans, we should call boastfulness, has the present lead- 
er of our nation risen to so high a pre-eminence above all 
the statesmen of his time ? 

The experiment which is being made in America for the 
benefit, as it seems of mankind in general, (at least of those 
who have no particular class interests and look only to the 
general good,) is twofold. The Americans are trying not 
only whether society can be placed on a broader, and, as 
most men would allow, sounder and juster, basis than that of 
opulence ruling over pauperism ; but whether religion, when 
deprived of the support of state authority (a support which 
you must see is beginning to prove not adamantine), can rest 
securely on free conviction. Whether this part of the exper- 
iment has succeeded or failed, is a question far too large to be 
dealt with here. It is clear that religion, though free, re- 
tains its hold upon the nation. The voluntary payments for 
the maintenance of churches exceed in amount the revenues 
of the richest establishment in the world. There is a good 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 21 

deal of religious zeal, combined, if De Tocqueville may be 
trusted, with full social toleration. Theological questions ex- 
cite great interest ; and the theology of the Americans, if 
less learned than ours, and inferior in literary qualities, is 
more robust, grapples more vigorously with great questions, 
and is therefore more likely in the end to lead to truth. 
Appeals are made in extremity to the religion of the Amer- 
ican people — and even, in spite of the diversity of sects, to 
its common religion — as confidently and with as much suc- 
cess as to ours. The conflict between religious principles 
and material objects in a great commercial nation is severe ; 
but though we are far removed from the days of the Puritan 
fathers and their " plantation religious," it cannot be said 
that religious piinciples have as yet succumbed. 

The best index, after all, of the influence of religion, is 
the national character: and the severest tests of national 
character are pestilence and civil war. All civil war is 
horrible. But I confidently assert that this civil war has so 
far been, on the part of the North, without exception, the 
most humane in history. "We scarcely need a better proof 
of the fact than the perpetual harping on the proclamation 
of Butler, which, after all, was only words, and would have 
been soon forgotten in presence of very bloody deeds. In 
our own civil war, which was far more humane than those 
of Rome, Greece, France, or any other country however 
civilized, Essex, the finest gentleman as well as one of the 
most gallant soldiers of his time, when asked by the Queen 
for a safe-conduct, she being ill after childbirth, answered 
her with an unfeeling jest. I need not remind you of the 
atrocities which attended the storming of Drogheda and 
Wexford on the one side, and that of Leicester on the other. 
Excesses have been committed by the Federal armies. Ex- 
cesses are committed by all armies in an enemy's country. 
Excesses of the most horrible kind were committed even by 



22 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

our own armies on these very scenes. Confederate property 
has been destroyed by Federals on land, while Federal prop- 
erty was being destroyed, and in a way peculiarly barbarous 
and exasperating, by the Confederates at sea. These 
ravages, and expressions of ferocious hatred, for which, I 
think, I could find you parallels not excused by the frenzy 
of battle on this side of the water, seem to be the chief of- 
fences of the North. We have heard of no denial of quar- 
ter, no maltreatment of Confederate prisoners, and assistance 
has been given without distinction to the wounded of both 
sides. No language, so far as I am aware, has ever been 
used so disgraceful as the yell for " revolutionary energy," 
that is, for indiscriminate burning and massacre, which arose 
at the time of the Sepoy revolt from the infuriated and panic- 
stricken population of Calcutta. The Chairman of your 
Manchester meeting tells us that this is the most ferocious 
war that has been waged for a century. Not to mention the 
Spanish civil war, in which the aged mother of a chief was 
put to death and horribly avenged, or the days of June at 
Paris, when no quarter was given, and poisoned lint was 
sent to the wounded, — the Irish Rebellion of 1798 falls 
well within a century. Read the account of the reign of ter- 
ror, — the scourgings, half-hangings, pitch-cappings, picket- 
ings, rapes, burnings, plunderings, massacres, carried on by 
the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and their satellites during the 
viceroyalty of Lord Camden. Read it not in Rebel histories, 
but in the correspondence of brave and loyal soldiers, such 
as Cornwallis and Abercrombie, who turned away sickened 
from the sight, — and learn how terrible and how difficult 
to control are the passions of civil war. Butler has gone un- 
censured : so did Anglo-Irish terrorists ten thousand times 
more infamous. The wrongs of the Irish people were 
brought under the notice of the House of Lords ; but the 
House of Lords, bishops and all, turned a deaf ear to the 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 23 

complaint. The riots and massacres at New York were in- 
genuously charged on Northern ferocity. They were got up 
in the interest of the South by Southern agents, and they 
were perpetrated by Irish rowdies, fresh, as most of the 
rowdyism is, from the misgovernmnnt of other countries. I 
may be mistaken, but I cannot help thinking that even a 
certain affection for the Southerns has continued to exist in 
the hearts of the Northerns through all the fury of the fray : 
respect for the military heroism of the South certainly has 
not failed. The chief organ of your party proclaimed with 
great exultation, that the hearts of the Northern women 
were in favor of the South, and against their own husbands 
and brothers. This was a fiction invented to gratify 
the' generous tastes of the circle in which these writers 
move ; but it is true that both sexes in the North have re- 
garded Southern valor as half their own ; and this feeling 
will be a healing influence when the hour of reconciHation 
arrives. That any blood will be shed upon the scaffold 
when the war is over, that any policy will be pursued but 
that of general amnesty with very limited exceptions (ex- 
ceptions in the case of men whose ambition has sent hun- 
dreds of thousands to their graves), no one for a moment 
imagines. And the absence of such apprehension is a strong 
proof that the spirit of humanity has not lost its power. 

This estimate of the American institutions, and of their 
effect on national character, as shown under the trial of civil 
war, is of course open to dispute : it rests partly on evidences 
which are at present incomplete, and will not be complete 
till the end of the war. I do not expect a man of Southern 
leanings to accept it as true. I only ask him to consider 
before he plunges us into war with the Federals, whether in 
that storm-tost vessel, which with straining planks and in 
imminent danger of wreck, holds her course against wind and 
sea, there may not be embarked, as I firmly believe there is, 



24 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

something in which humanity has an interest, and which no 
man but a very narrow-minded member of a privileged 
order or church would willingly see perish. I only ask him 
to consider whether in the course of Providence it may not 
have been given to the peasant founders of New England, 
as well as to the followers of Hengist or Clovis, to open a 
new order of things, not without benefit to large classes to 
whom the old order of things had not been so kind ; and 
whether, if this be the case, an attempt on the part of those 
who profit by the old order of things violently to crush the 
new order, lest by its success it should ultimately imperil 
the continuance of the old, would not be rather selfish, and 
even rather unsafe. 

The Americans, I fully grant, were entitled to no sym- 
pathy while they remained accomplices in Slavery. You 
might admire their marvellous energy, industry, and national 
prosperity. You might see with pleasure the improvement 
of the laborer's condition in the Free States. You might 
own that the desire of territorial greatness, to which they 
sacrificed their moral greatness, was natural and almost 
universal. You might hope, and even feel sure, that the 
day would come when they would find by bitter experi- 
ence that Freedom and Slavery could not dwell together, 
and when, rather than sink under that deadly tyranny, they 
would risk the loss of territorial greatness. You might 
mark that conscience was not dead among them, but lived 
and struggled in a party which resigned the hope of political 
power that it might be true to Abolition. But you could 
not regard them as representatives of the rights of labor, or 
of political freedom, or of any other great principle, before 
the world. Now, however, the day long foreseen has ar- 
rived. The Slave-owner, no longer able to tyrannize under 
the forms of the Constitution, has appealed to force, and 
Freedom and Slavery are grappling in mortal struggle for 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 25 

the possession of the New World. In the sufferings of the 
war the Free States expiate the apostasy of the past. Take 
care you do not lead us into the same apostasy, and into as 
bitter an expiation. 

As to this war, no one was more opposed to it at the out- 
set than I was. I too, though in the interest of the Free 
States, would have said, Part in peace ; Tiot seeing, as the 
people with their sounder instincts have seen, that between 
nations formed by a violent disruption, and divided by no 
natural boundary, there would be no peace, but perpetual 
hatred, constant wars, and standing armies, the scourge of 
industry and the ruin of freedom. I thought the task of 
subjugation hopeless, suicidal, and therefore criminal. I 
knew from history the tremendous strength of slave Powers, 
in which the masters are an army supplied by the slaves 
with food. I knew also the vast extent of the country to 
be subjugated, and the difficulties which it presented to an 
invader. I knew that the power of the slave-owning oli- 
garchy of the South would enforce a unity in their councils 
and actions, which the parties of the free North would be 
long in attaining ; and that though there was a loyal party 
in the South, as the very process of Secession and the voting 
at the Presidential election proved, the strong arm of the 
oligarch would put down all dissent. I did not know, for in 
truth we had never fairly seen, the power of a great and 
united nation, every member of which was a full citizen, and 
felt the common cause to be entirely his own. Yet there 
was a precedent in history which might in some measure 
have furnished a key to the probable result. We are all 
taking on this occasion nearly the same side which we 
should have taken in our own civil war in the time of 
Charles L, excepting perhaps a part of the shopkeepers, 
who in those days had strong convictions, but who in these 
days have no yery strong convictions, and are led to take 
2 



26 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

the side of the South because thej fancy it to be genteel. 
That civil war was marked in its course by nearly the same 
vicissitudes as this. The Commons, superior in numbers, in 
wealth, and the material of war, fell with overweening con- 
fidence on the Cavaliers. But the Cavaliers had at first the 
advantage in military spirit and in the habit of command, 
while the retainers whom they brought into the field were 
better trained to obey. Edgehill was not unlike Bull's Run. 
One wing of the Parliamentary army galloped off the field 
without striking a blow ; and Clarendon declares that, though 
the battle began on an autumn afternoon, runaways, and not 
only common soldiers, but officers of rank, were in St. Alban's 
before dark. Then followed despondency as deep as the 
previous self-confidence had been high and boastful. Over- 
tures were made to the King, and Pym and Hampden, the 
" rabid fanatics " of that day, had great difficulty in prevent- 
ing a surrender. Nor was treason wanting, in camp or 
council, to complete the parallel. Still darker days fol- 
lowed ; and wdien the King sat down before Gloucester, the 
friends of " Slavery, Subordination, and Government," at 
that time, must have felt as sure of victory as they did when 
General Lee was approaching the heights of Gettysburg. 
But our Puritan Fathers had the root of greatness in them ; 
and therefore they were chastened, not crushed, by adver- 
sity. Necessity brought the right men to the front, and gave 
the ascendency in council to those who were fighting for a 
principle, and who knew their own minds. The armies, 
which at first were filled with tapsters and serving-men, 
were recruited from the yeomen, of whom, with their small 
estates, there were plenty in Old England ; but who, since 
the soil of Old England has become the property of a few 
'wealthy men, have found another home in the New. The 
moderate commanders who did not mean to win, gave way 
to commanders who did. Treason was trodden out and 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 27 



disunion quelled. There was no more boastfulness, no 
more despondency, but stern resolution. The Commons 
measured their work, settled down to it, and won. We 
deem that struggle heroic, and feel a mournful pride in look- 
ing back on it : but you cannot be famihar with its history, 
if you do not know that it had its wicked, its mean, even its 
ridiculous, as well as its heroic, phase ; or think it impossible 
that, when removed by the lapse of centuries from close 
inspection, the struggle which we are now watching may 
appear quite as grand. 

It was reasonable too, I think, to feel great misgivings — 
I know that I at least felt them — as to the object of the war 
and its issue, supposing the North to be victorious. I ex- 
pected, and the language of the North warranted us in 
expecting, reconstruction with Slavery, and the restoration 
of that baneful tyranny, inexpressibly worse than any num- 
ber of disruptions. Indeed, I am quite ready to admit that 
it was only in the course of the war, and as the fact that 
Slavery was the incorrigible source of disunion, as well as 
of all other political and social evil, was brought home to 
them, that the majority of the Northerns resolved on its 
destruction, and that Emancipation became the policy of the 
nation. But that Emancipation is now the policy of the 
nation, — even of old Democrats such as General Grant, — 
there can be no doubt whatever. Every additional year 
of war places reconstruction on any basis but that of imme- 
diate or speedy Abolition, more completely out of the ques- 
tion. Nothing but the victory of the Slave-owners can save 
Slavery from destruction. 

I will add to these reasons for having been originally 
opposed to the war, the very deep horror with which all I 
ever heard or read has filled me of wars in general, and the 
strong sense which I have of the fact, that, under the modern 
system of standing armies, those who to gratify their own 



28 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

passions plunge nations into wars, and who swagger about 
national courage and national honor, do not risk their own 
lives, but sit safe at home, and bravely send poor peasants, 
ignorant of the quarrel and utterly unconcerned in it, to 
bloody graves, — a fact which I beg you to bear in mind 
with reference to warlike members of our own Legislature, 
and clergymen who wish to embroil us with the North, as 
well as with reference to the warlike orators and preachers 
of the United States. But the war has been begun, and is 
now probably drawing towards its close, whatever its des- 
tined issue may be. "We are not responsible for it. The 
only question is whether we shall interfere, and (if Slavery 
is wrong) on the wrong side. 

The grounds upon which the Southern Association ap- 
peals to this country are succinctly set forth in the Address to 
the Public, which is evidently the work of a careful as well 
as a skilful hand. Let us pass them very briefly in review ; 
always remembering that the present object is practical, and 
that it is not to dissuade you from sympathizing with the 
insurgent aristocracy of the Southern States, which w^ould 
neither be a very hopeful nor a very fruitful undertaking, 
but to inquire whether you have any rational pretence for 
calling upon England to deviate from the principle of not 
interfering, for class or party purposes, in the internal revo- 
lutions of other countries, to which we have pretty steadily 
of late years adhered, after trying the opposite course, and 
finding that it cost us dear. 

"SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION 
OF LONDON. 

" Public opinion is becoming enlightened upon the disruption of the 
late United States, and upon the character of the war which has been 
raging on the American continent for nearly three years. British sub- 
jects were at iirst hardly able to realize a federation of States each in 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 29 

itself possessed of sovereign attributes ; while deriving their views of 
American history from New York and New England, they ascribed the 
secession of the Southern States to pique at a lost election, and to fear 
for the continuance of an institution peculiarly distasteful to English- 
men. Assurances were rife from those quarters that the movement 
was the conspiracy of a few daring men, and that a strong Union senti- 
ment existed in the seceding States, which would soon assert its exist- 
ence under stress of the war. 

« Gradually the true causes of the disruption have made themselves 
more and more manifest. The long-widening and now insuperable 
divergence of character and interests between the two sections of the 
former Union has been made palpable by the facts of the gigantic strug- 
gle. Their wisdom in council, their endurance in the field, and the 
universal self-sacrifice which has characterized their public and their 
private life, have won general sympathy for the Confederates as a 
people worthy of, and who have earned, their independence. 

" On the other hand, the favorable judgment which Englishmen had 
long cherished as a duty towards that portion of the United States 
which they imagined most to resemble the Mother Country has met 
with many rude shocks from the spectacles which have been revealed in 
that land of governmental tyranny, corruption in high places, ruthless- 
ness in war, untruthfulness of speech, and causeless animosity towards 
Great Britain. At the same time the Southerners, who had been very 
harshly judged in this country, have manifested the highest national 
characteristics, to the surprise and admiration of all. 

" Public men are awakening to the truth that it is both useless and 
mischievous to ignore the gradual settlement of Central North America 
into groups of States, or consolidated nationalities, each an independent 
Power. They feel that the present attempt of the North is in manifest 
opposition to this law of natural progress, and they see that the South 
can never be reunited with the North except as a conquered and garri- 
soned dependency ; whilst the Northern States, if content to leave their 
former partners alone, are still in possession of all the elements of 
great and growing national power and wealth. 

" Our commercial classes are also beginning to perceive that our best 
interests will be promoted by creating a direct trade with a people so 
enterprising as the Confederates, inhabiting a land so wide and so 
abundant in the richest gifts of Providence, and anxious to place them- 



30 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

selves in immediate connection with the manufacturers and consumers 
of Europe. 

" In short, the struggle is now felt to be, according to Earl Russell's 
pregnant expression, one for independence on the part of the South, 
and for empire on the part of the North ; for an independence, on the 
one hand, which it is equitable for themselves and desirable for the 
world they should achieve ; for an empire, on the other hand, which is 
only possible at the price of the first principles of Federal Republi- 
canism, and whose establishment by fire and sword, and at a countless 
cost of human life on both sides, would be the ruin of the Southern 
States. These, surely, are reasons which invoke the intervention of 
other Powers, if intervention be possible, in the cause of common 
humanity. 

" Therefore, not in enmity to the North, but sympathizing with the 
Confederates, the Southern Independence Association of London has 
been formed, to act in concert with that which is so actively and use- 
fully at work in Manchester. It will serve as the rallying-point in 
London of all who believe that the dignity and interest of Great Britain 
will best be consulted by speedily and cheerfully recognizing a brave 
people sprung from ourselves, speaking our language, heretofore organ- 
ized for internal government into well-established sovereignties, now 
confederated under a stable Central Administration, and claiming 
recognition, in accordance with those principles of British policy which 
have always been more inclined to help the oppressed than to justify 
and abet the oppressor, and ever to respect a unanimous national will. 

" The precedents of the separation of Belgium and of Greece, and of 
the reconstruction of Italy, exist as modern instances to show that 
Great Britain is always ready to acknowledge, rather than to resist, a 
national uprising. It would be difficult to show that any of these 
countries was as well organized for self-government as the Confederate 
States have now been for nearly three years. Unlike them, each State 
of the Confederacy had its own constitution and government complete 
and in working order, and had ever since gone on acting upon them 
without change or difficulty. 

" The Association will also devote itself to the cultivation of friendly 
feelings between the people of Great Britain and of the Confederate 
States ; and it will, in particular, steadily but kindly represent to the 
Southern States that recognition by Europe must necessarily lead to a 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 31 

revision of the system of servile labor unhappily bequeathed to them 
by England, in accordance vi^ith the spirit of the age, so as to combine 
the gradual extinction of slavery with the preservation of property, the 
maintenance of the civil polity, and the true civilization of the Negro 
race." 

The Committee, tlie names of whose members are ap- 
pended, is highly aristocratic in its character. The List of 
the Members of the Association, which has also been pub- 
lished, contains a large proportion of men of title and family, 
whose names head the list, and a good sprinkling of clergy- 
men, curiously associated with the Member for Sheffield; 
but it is not so strong in representatives of the interests of 
the laboring class. 

We need not dwell long on the opening paragraphs of the 
Address. The question now before us is, not whether 
the struggle ought to have been commenced, but whether this 
country ought to interfere in it. But even writers who most 
intensely hate the Federals, and most violently condemn them 
for persevering with English tenacity, and in spite of all dis- 
asters, in the gigantic task which they had undertaken, allow 
that originally the right was on their side, that Lincoln's 
election was perfectly constitutional, and that he had done no 
single act to provoke rebellion against a Government which 
the present Vice-President of the Confederacy had himself 
pronounced to be, in its general character, the most just and 
beneficent in the world. Your own Address in effect con- 
firms this judgment ; for it ascribes the rebellion to a diverg- 
ence of character and interests which has gradually come to 
light in the course of the struggle, and which therefore can 
hardly have been its original justification, much less a ground 
for condemning the President's attempt to maintain, as was 
his bounden duty, the integrity of the nation constitutionally 
committed to his hands. As to the power of secession at 
will, and without provocation, British subjects might well 



32 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

find a difficulty, as you say they did, in realizing a commu- 
nity founded on so singular a basis, more especially as the 
United States had dealt with us, as well as with all other 
countries, and entered into perpetual and indefeasible treaties 
with us as a single Sovereign Power.* The Constitution con- 
tained no article of the kind, and you will scarcely require 
us to believe, though I have seen it suggested, that the 
framers were so fatuous as to omit the mention of this funda- 
mental right, and make no legal provision for its exercise, 
leaving the nation to the chances of violent disruption and 
civil war, for fear of suggesting the topic to men's minds ; as 
though (not to mention the other absurdities of such a course) 
anything could be more suggestive than so conspicuous an 
omission. But even if a legal right of secession existed, this 
was not an exercise of it. This was a conspiracy hatched 
with all the incidents which mark the proceedings of conspir- 
ators, and under circumstances of peculiar perfidy arising 
from the position of the authors as the elective rulers and 
guardians of the state. One of the leaders writes to his con- 
federate to suggest secret dealings with the national armor- 
ies for the purposes of the plot, and ends his letter by de- 
scribing himself as a " candidate for the first halter." Is this 
the language of men preparing to exercise a legal right? 

Some of your party seem to think that a president has 
not a right, like a king, to put down unprovoked rebellion. 
They appear to regard a commonwealth as the offspring of 
political crime, in which no legal authority can reside. You, 
as a Whig, will not agree ^v4th them ; more especially as you 
must see that no form of government but a commonwealth 
being possible under the conditions of American society, to 

* If I understand the theory rightly, ^Maryland and Virginia might have 
'seceded at wil], and cut off the capital. A central State, commanding 
indispensable lines of communication, would thus be mistress of the exist- 
ence of the nation. 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 33 

deny that lawful authority can reside in such a Government 
would be to proclaim perpetual anarchy in America. Nor 
will you maintain that a Government which had its origin in 
a just rebellion is thereby disqualified from putting down 
a rebellion which is unjust. You know too well that our 
Government had its origin in the just rebellion of 1688. 
The noblemen and clergymen of this country, in their pas- 
sionate hatred of a free community, the success of which they 
suppose to be fraught with eventual danger to social and 
ecclesiastical privilege, are tearing up the foundations on 
which not only all privilege, but all society rests. They are 
inciting to treason and insurrection all sections of any com- 
munity which may think that there is a divergence of interest 
and character between them and the rest of the nation. 
Such a facility of political divorce might not be without dan- 
ger to the union of the " Two Nations " which the Tory 
author of Sibyl has described as existing with totally diverg- 
ent characters and interests in this country. It would have 
warranted the Free Traders of the North of England in 
declaring themselves independent of the Protectionist South : 
indeed, according to the theory which was elaborately pro- 
pounded as a subterfuge for English morality in sympathiz- 
ing with the Slave-owners, but which seems now to have 
served its turn, the difference between the Free Traders 
and the Protectionists was the great cause and justification 
of this secession. As to the principles on which the integrity 
of the British Empire reposes, our aristocracy has given 
them to the winds. It has left itself without the shadow of 
a warrant for coercing Ireland, in case of a general rising in 
that country : and. Heaven knows, in that case the diverg- 
ence of character and interests, (if that is a justification of 
rebellion,) is wide enough. 

However, I will freely admit that the rebellion was caused 
by a divergence of character and interests, not between the 

2* 



34 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

mass of the people North and South of a certain geo- 
graphical line (for Western Virginia did not secede, and 
other Southern districts seceded only under pressure), but 
between the Slave-owners and the mass of the people. This 
collision had long been foreseen by all observers, and it has 
come at last. So long as the Slave-owners could command 
a majority in Congress, and elect a President of their own 
by the help of the party connected with them commercially, 
or under their influence in other ways, they were content to 
remain in the Union, though they were alarmed, and justly 
alarmed, by the growth of moral sentiment, and the increas- 
ing efforts of the Abolition party in the North. But when 
the Republican party triumphed in the election of a Presi- 
dent, they felt that the hour for which they had long been 
secretly preparing was come : they rose in arms and dragged 
■with them into insurrection the free laboring population en- 
closed within the limits of their power. The danger which 
had long been threatening Slavery from the spread of the 
Abolition doctrines and the attitude of the Abolition party in 
the North, is the sole cause of secession alleged in the 
secession Ordinances, and the sole motive for secession dis- 
closed in the Confederate Constitution, which follows the 
Federal Constitution in all essential respects, except that it 
includes special clauses protecting, as a fundamental article of 
the Confederation, the property of the master in the negro 
slave, and removing the limits which the Federal law set to 
the extension of Slavery into new States. The insurrection 
followed exactly the winding boundary line of Slavery, pass- 
ing between the slave-breeding part of Virginia and the free- 
labor part of the same State ; its focus was in the centre of 
Slavery, and its intensity was graduated in different parts of 
the insurgent territory, according to the prevalence of the 
Slave or Free interest. Its outbreak was attended by new 
developments of the Slavery doctrine, of the most startling 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 35 

kind, and by apocalyptic visions of a vast Slave empire 
stretching from the tomb of Washington to the palaces of 
Montezuma, while it was not attended by any new develop- 
ments of economical doctrine, or by any visions of emanci- 
pated trade. In fact, I must do the ambitious leaders of the 
revolt the justice to say, that the idea of destroying the ma- 
jestic fabric of the Union for the sake of a tariff is more 
congenial to the mercantile genius from which the theory 
emanated than to the aspiring spirit of President Davis or 
General Lee. 

I agree with the Slave-owners in believing that the Abo- 
litionists of the North were sincere, and that Slavery was in 
real, though probably not in immediate, peril : and, if we 
set aside the immorality of their institution, I am not sure 
that self-preservation might not fairly be pleaded as in part 
an excuse for what they have done. It might have been 
pleaded, perhaps, with more justice if the extension of 
slavery, as well as the maintenance of it where it exists, 
had not been part of their design. They cast the die, how- 
ever, well knowing that they staked all upon the event ; 
and they have not been sparing of the lives or fortunes of 
others in playing out their game. The result has been to 
bring destruction, in all probability, on what with a delicacy 
of expression almost Southern you call " an institution pecu- 
liarly distasteful to the English people." I hope, indeed, that 
the institution in question is still peculiarly distasteful to the 
English people, in spite of the efforts which have been made 
in a great variety of ways to reconcile them to it ; and 
therefore I hope, and am confident, that the people will de- 
cline your invitation to interfere, at the risk of war, for the 
purpose of saving it from its approaching fall. 

No doubt the Federals, in proceeding, against all expec- 
tation, and, as I have before confessed, to my dismay, to 
coerce the Slave-owners, were actuated by very mixed mo- 



36 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

tives. There was a desire to prevent, on moral grounds, 
the establishment of a Slave Power, and to save the negroes 
from being swept away into hopeless bondage, of the sin- 
cerity of which the fear of Abolition which drove the Slave- 
owners to revolt is, as I said before, a sufficient proof. 
There was the desire which all loyal citizens feel to punish 
treason and put down unprovoked rebellion. There was 
the desire (not, perhaps, altogether wise, but neither alto- 
gether unnatural, nor altogether criminal) to preserve the 
greatness of the Union. There was anger, not philosophic, 
but such as treachery, violence, and insolence will awaken 
in mortal breasts ; there was mortified vanity ; there was 
pique at the shout of exultation raised by the enemies of 
freedom in Europe over the ruin, as they thought, of the 
great Commonwealth. The less worthy motives predomi- 
nated, perhaps, at the beginning of the contest ; the worthier, 
I think, have been gradually gaining the ascendency as it 
has gone on. But in deciding whether we shall interfere 
on the side of the South, we must look to the practical in- 
terests of humanity, which I suppose you admit to be on the 
side of Free Labor, not to the motives of the North. Are 
we to make England an accomplice in the creation of a 
great Slave Power, and in its future extension from the tomb 
of Washington to the palaces of Montezuma, because the 
motives of those who are fighting against it are not alto- 
gether unalloyed ? 

I have admitted that there is a divergence of character as 
well as of interest between the Slave-owner and the free 
laborer, or the employer of free labor. The Slave-owner 
always has been, and always will be, a despot, incapable of 
living on equal terms with other men. But there is no di- 
vergence of character such as would be a bar to political 
union between the whites of the South who are not Slave- 
owners and their kinsmen (for nobody but a man laboring 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 37 

under rhetorical frenzy would deny that they are kinsmen) 
at the North. The whites of the South have been taught to 
spurn labor as degraded, and have themselves been degraded 
by so doing. But this war, if I mistake not, by placing them 
under military discipline, has raised their character, and made 
them more capable of living under law ; while the destruction 
of Slavery will necessarily convert them into free laborers 
of some kind, or employers of free labor. 

Suppose the Emancipation policy to be carried into effect ; 
suppose the Slave-owning aristocracy, which will not live 
with freedom, which " hates everything free, from free-schools 
upwards," to be abolished, and its members reduced to the 
level of citizens, I see, judging from the experience of his- 
tory, no impediment to the complete and permanent restora- 
tion of the Union. Though civil war is so fierce, its wounds 
are soon healed. People who must live together, and trade 
and intermarry with each other, cannot long keep up mutual 
hatred. Sadness will take the place of harsher feelings ; and 
in the present case, as there have been victories on both sides, 
and each side has had cause to respect the valor of the other, 
the quarrel will not be kept alive in the heart of the van- 
quished by the rankling sense of humiliation. The first pa- 
triotic object, the first struggle with a foreign enemy, which 
reawakens national feelings, will probably complete the 
cure ; and neighboring powers must beware of the tendency 
which has so often been shown, to bury the memory of civil 
in foreign war. The few years of Cromwell's Protectorate, 
though following a most bitter and protracted civil war, and 
themselves full of partial insurrections, plots, and decimations 
of the vanquished party, sufficed to bring about reconcilia- 
tion to a considerable degree among the great body of the 
people. Not many years since, a part of the Swiss Confed- 
eration seceded from the rest in the cause of Jesuitism, 
which had disturbed the peace of that community, as Slavery 



38 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

has disturbed the peace of the Union. The other cantons 
marched upon them, coerced them, expelled the Jesuits, and 
restored the Confederation. Complete reconciliation ensued, 
and of that quarrel, I believe, there is now no trace. 

No doubt the Union party in the South has for the time 
been effectually crushed by the strong arm of the oligarchs ; 
but it does not follow that Union sentiment is extinct, or that 
it will not revive if the power of the oligarchy is overthrown. 
In the Southern as well as the Northern States, there pre- 
vails, Slavery apart, a strong desire for a wide and united 
empire as a source of strength and greatness. This desire is 
60 strong, that very good judges, thoroughly acquainted with 
the Southern States, thought it would bind the North and 
South together, in spite of the manifest tendency of Slavery 
to rend them asunder. You hold it to be for the interest of 
" your own dear country " that a disruption should be effect- 
ed, and that the great power of the American Common- 
wealth, which we choose to think and do our best to make 
hostile to this country, should be broken in two. So said 
the Noble Chairman of your Manchester meeting, discarding 
for a moment the language of disinterested sympathy with 
the patriotism and heroism of the Slave-owners, and allowing 
a less romantic but more natural motive to appear. I hold 
this motive for taking the wrong side in the greatest moral 
struggle, and the most pregnant with future good or evil to 
humanity, of our days, to be as baseless as it is selfish. I 
maintain that, class interests and class fears being set aside, 
there is no reason why the English people here should re- 
gard with apprehension the greatness of the English people 
on the other side of the Atlantic ; or why their greatness 
should not be to all intents and purposes a part of our own. 
But be this as it may, it is clear that the final disruption 
which the enemies of American greatness, for their purposes, 
desire to promote, the friends of American greatness will in 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 39 

the same degree desire to avoid : and that the Southerns as 
well as the Northerns are friends to American greatness. 
If you wished to render the restoration of the Union impos- 
sible, you should have been more cautious in disclosing the 
diplomatic object of your sympathy with the South. 

It is as needless as it would be odious to discuss the truth 
of the comparison which you draw between the character of 
the Federals and that of the Confederates. For you cannot 
seriously expect the Government to take a dangerous step 
merely on the ground of your personal predilections. It 
must strike you as singular, that the line of demarcation 
which separates perfect virtue from perfect vice should ex- 
actly coincide with Slavery. You judge the conduct and 
language of the Federals by an unfair standard ; by the 
standard of nations living in peace and tranquillity, not by 
the standard of nations whose fiercest passions are stirred to 
their depths by a terrible conflict, and who are surrounded by 
the atmosphere which, charged with fear, suspicion, false ru- 
mors, and wild hopes, hangs over revolutionary war. Name 
any other great civil war in history, and, if its details remain 
to us, I will undertake to show you that your special con-, 
demnation of the Americans is unjust. You have, more- 
over, been prevented by the intensity of your prejudices 
from noting the change which has been wrought in the char- 
acter of the people under its trials, and you take as true now 
all that might have been true at the date of Bull's Run, 
when the Americans were but just entering the fiery fur- 
nace through which they have since passed. And further, 
your accounts of the untruthfulness of speech and the other 
crimes with which you charge a whole nation of the same 
blood as our own, are taken, I have no doubt, from a journal 
which has itself, through the whole of these transactions, 
been a palmary instance of untruthfulness of speech, and 
of everything else which can degrade the calling of a pub- 



40 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

lie instructor. " Few journalists," says an English periodi- 
cal of Southern leanings, " have ever incurred greater re- 
sponsibility than the New York correspondent of the Times. 
It is on his testimony alone that a large and most influential 
class of English society has sympathized with the South. 
He has throughout acted the part of an unscrupulous ad- 
vocate, carefully reporting to his employers, and through 
them to all England, every statement and every fact which 
could create contempt and disgust against the conduct, the 
principles, and, in general, the cause of the North. He has 
uniformly represented the Federalists as tyrants, marauders, 
curs who bought Irishmen and Germans to fight their bat- 
tles, fraudulent bankrupts, and odious hypocrites. Of course 
he is not abusive : '■ Our own correspondent ' never is ; but 
in a quiet way he reports every discreditable fact, every 
dirty job, every harsh or cruel act in the conduct of the 
war; he quotes every blackguard rant of the New York 
Herald, and he leaves out of sight all that is heroic or pa- 
thetic." * The writer proceeds to show, that, considering 
the difference between American manners and ours, the un- 
doubted existence of a great " blackguard element " in New 
York, the disorder necessarily incident to an immense army 
raised in a few months, and the unexampled temptation held 
out to jobbing by the enormous and sudden expenditure, 
"nothing could be easier than to misrepresent the whole 
aspect of the war, without saying a single word that was not 
either true or at all events attested by plausible evidence." 
Not that the Times has confined itself to misrepresentation 
of this kind. Its readers still, I presume, believe, on its au- 
thority, that the Admiralty cases in the United States are 
sent to be tried before a low attorney ; and that Mr. Wen- 
dell Philips has withdrawn his son from the conscription, 
though Mr. Philips has no son, a fact of which the editor of 

* Fraser'3 Magazine, October, 1S63. 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 41 

the Times was made aware. Even Mr. Reuter's telegrams 
were too impartial, and others were substituted, in which 
mere vituperation could be given as authentic news. We 
have strong reason to think that the correspondents wrote 
to order, unless their reports were tampered with ; for one 
of them has published a work on his own account giving a 
picture of these transactions very unlike that which was 
given in the Times. 

While the Slave-owners were loyal to the Union, noth- 
ing was too bad to be asserted and believed of them. The 
Times could even swallow the delirious figments of a lunatic 
who fancied that he had seen horrible murders and ferocious 
duels committed with perfect impunity in the carriages on 
their railways. It is only since they have become the de- 
stroyers of the Union that they have appeared to our en- 
chanted eyes paragons of every public and every private 
virtue. The Southern Correspondent of the Times is a per- 
son whose history is well known to the public, and on whose 
representations reliance cannot be safely placed. The char- 
acter of the "mean whites" in the South seems, as I said 
before, to have been improved by military discipline ; and 
the whole Confederacy, under the rule of a strong oligarchy, 
has shown extraordinary vigor in war. The valor of the 
troops has been sometimes sullied by great ferocity, espe- 
cially in their treatment of negroes in the Federal service. 
This is really all that we know at present. To talk of " pri- 
vate virtue," as the special attribute of the Slave-owners 
and their dependents, is surely to leave the evidence far 
behind. 

You speak of the causeless animosity of the Federals 
towards Great Britain. To have your merchantmen burnt, 
and your commerce driven from the seas, by vessels issuing 
from the ports of an ally, sailing under his flag, and manned 
with seamen belonging to his naval reserve, — to have his 



42 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

Parliament loudly applauding the builder of these vessels, 
and exulting in the ravages which they have committed, and 
this in spite of your having honorably done your duty in 
like cases to him, — to see an outlying fort of his on your 
coast covering with its guns a swarm of blockade runners to 
feed the resistance of your enemy and protract to you the 
expenses and sufferings of war, ' — to be assailed day after 
day, not only with the most rancorous and insulting abuse, 
but with the grossest calumnies, by newspapers which are 
universally and justly regarded as the organs of the English 
upper classes and of the English Government, — to be called 
the scum and refuse of Europe by a member of the English 
Legislature on a public occasion, and in presence of a Prime 
Minister whose own language and actions in Parliament in- 
dicate that he sympathizes with the sentiment: — all this may 
not be thought an adequate cause of animosity, but that it is 
a natural cause you will hardly deny, unless you deem all 
commonwealths too vulgar to be allowed to feel an insult. 
The Americans, as new-comers, have been too sensitive to 
the opinion of historic nations, especially (in their hearts) 
to the opinion of this country, and too anxious for foreign 
applause. They want a history of their own, and hence- 
forth they will have one, to banish this childish vanity and 
put manly pride in its place. Meantime their language, 
even the language of their public men, has sometimes been 
such as to degrade the grandeur of their efforts and sully 
the goodness of their cause. But they had a fair right to 
be surprised and indignant, when they found, or thought they 
found, that we sympathized with the Slave-owners, — we 
who gave ourselves out to the world, and were always ap- 
plauding ourselves as the great crusaders against Slavery, 
and who were arrogating extraordinary powers and doing 
high-handed and obnoxious things all over the ocean, as the 
professed champions of the antislavery cause. Their feel- 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 43 

ings toward us have been greatly improved, and their lan- 
guage has become more courteous since they discovered that 
the malignity which finds its organ in the Times was that 
of a party and not of the English people. 

You may persuade yourselves that your hearts were on 
the side of the Free States at first, and that the conduct of 
the two parties in the struggle has compelled you reluctantly 
to transfer your attachment to the Slave-owners. But you 
will not so easily make us forget the books and pamphlets 
teeming with hatred of the Republic which were pubhshed 
by some of your number at the very beginning of the war. 
And so, when you protest that you are not actuated by en- 
mity to the North, you ought to tell us what other emotion 
than enmity, such language as "scum and refuse of Europe," 
" more degraded than the Mexicans," is intended to express. 
If we are to deal out charges of hypocritical lying against a 
whole nation, we must at all events take care that all is per- 
fectly ingenuous on our side. The excuse, however, which 
you tender for your sympathy with the Slave-owners at least 
implies an admission that there is something in it needing an 
excuse: and if the members of the aristocracy who head 
your Committee some years ago cherished the love of free- 
dom as a duty, they will be able to make allowance for those 
who have not yet learnt to regard it as vulgar fanaticism and 
canting hypocrisy, or ceased to look upon a Slave Code 
which denies to a whole race not only lawful marriage, the 
right of giving evidence in a court of justice, and all the 
other rights of man, but the education which might raise the 
slave above the level of an animal, and the hope of emanci- 
pation, as one of the most terrible monuments of deliberate 
wickedness which the w^orld has ever seen. 

Pursuing the course of the argument in your Address, 
we come next to the proposition, that Central America 
must, by the laws of nature and for the good of its inhabi- 



44 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

tants, (and also, as has been candidly said, " of our own dear 
country,") be split up like Europe into a number of inde- 
pendent nations ; a truth to which you say public men are 
awakening, and which they find it impossible any longer 
to ignore ; though I trust they may find it possible to leave 
nature to carry into effect her own laws on the American 
Continent, as she will assuredly do in the long run, without 
the officious and superfluous aid of British arms. This idea, 
however, that the European system must be reproduced in 
America, though very natural, is, I suspect, in Baconian lan- 
guage, an idol of the cavern, — a fallacy of the narrow Euro- 
pean enclosure by which all our ideas are bounded, as those 
of the Siamese king were bounded by his Siam. The polit- 
ical progress of humanity through a series of successive 
phases, down to our time, is manifest enough. Why are we 
to suppose that it will not continue ? And if it is to con- 
tinue, what absurdity to act as though the order of things in 
which we happen to live were final, and to be forcing it, as 
the last achievement of exhausted Providence, on a new 
world. Multiplied centres of thought and action, at once 
stimulating and moderating each other, sustaining emulation, 
and furnishing comparative experience, are probably as de- 
sirable in America as in Europe : but it does not follow that 
they are to be produced exactly in the same way or at the 
same expense. In Europe they are produced by a division 
of the Continent into independent nations, based, generally 
speaking, on differences of race and language, and involving 
a corresponding division of interests and a liability to inter- 
national disputes, which can be settled only by the arbitra- 
ment of war ; whence the curse of standing armies, with 
which political liberty has scarcely found it possible to exist. 
But in North America, inhabited by people of one language 
and, if not originally, by fusion, of one race, the same end 
may be attained, without the same liabilities, by the system 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 45 

of federation, which seems designed by nature to bind the 
rising communities of the New World together in a Union 
combining all the political and intellectual advantages of 
national independence, all the mutual benefits of a group of 
nations, stimulating, educating, correcting, and sustaining 
each other, with the internal peace and external security of 
a vast empire. And the same system which to all appear- 
ances is best for the Americans, is the best also for other na- 
tions brought into contact with them ; for without national 
divisions they will have no occasion to maintain standing ar- 
mies; and without standing armies they, an industrial and 
frugal population, drawn with difficulty, as we see, from their 
farms and stores, will never be a source of danger to their 
neighbors. A federation, unlike a nation centralized in its 
capital, is capable of unlimited extension, provided that the 
federal principle be strictly observed, the central govern- 
ment confined to its necessary functions, and the local free- 
dom of the several States scrupulously respected : a rule 
from which it is to be hoped that nothing which has now 
taken place will induce the Americans, against the dictates 
of their highest interests, to depart. The mere distance 
across the continent, where there are railroads, and no sea 
or alien territory intervening, can never prevent the meeting 
of a Federal Council for the necessary concerns of the Con- 
federation. It is not to be forgotten that European Christen- 
dom was once, for important purposes, political and social as 
well as ecclesiastical, a confederation with the Pope at its 
head ; a state of things to which there is a growing disposi- 
tion to return, though by a more rational and better road. 
On the other hand, if you could succeed in dividing the 
population of Central America into separate nations, and 
introducing among them, as your leaders propose, the 
" balance of power," that is, a system of international jeal- 
ousy and suspicion, their state would be far worse than 



46 A LETTER TO A WHIG IVIEMBER OF THE 

ours ; because divisions artificially created and sustained for 
j)urposes implying national hostility, would be far more bit- 
ter, and more productive of quarrels, than natural divisions 
caused by race and language, which of themselves imply no 
hostility, and which it is the object of all right-minded men 
to soften gradually away. I believe that this fact has been 
present to the instinctive sense of the American people, in 
determining to face any present sacrifices, rather than con- 
sent to the permanent disruption of their nation. And 
whatever may be the sequel of the Avar, the main object, in 
this respect, has been already attained. The Slave-owners 
aimed at nothing less than the foundation of a vast slave 
empire stretching indefinitely westward and including Mex- 
ico, the mortal antagonism between which and the Free 
North would have ruined the tranquillity, security, and, to a 
great extent, the prosperity of the Continent forever. All 
fear of such a result as this is now at an end. Slavery will 
never cross the Mississippi. If the Old States succeed in 
establishing their independence, which is the utmost that is 
now to be feared, they will scarcely be a power formidable 
enough to keep the Continent under arms. Probably, as 
Slavery dies when confined to a limited area, they will sink, 
after a time, into decay. The convulsive force which has 
been in.spired into them, and the intense union into which 
they have been welded by the war, will pass away on the 
return of peace. Facts, which those who have the destinies 
of the commonwealth in their hands, and whose duty it is to 
consider how far her powers can be pressed without en- 
dangering objects more valuable to the Americans them- 
selves and to the world at large than the subjugation of 
the Old Slave States, will do well to keep before their 
minds. 

The Americans are as well aware as you can be of the in- 
terest which the European Governments have, or imagine 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 47 

they have, in producing disunion among the communities of 
the American Continent : and they see plainly enough what 
the consequences of giving an opening to European diplo- 
macy would be. They find, directly their Union appears 
likely to be dissolved, Canada goaded into an attitude of hos- 
tility on one side, and French ambition presenting itself in 
arms upon the other. Your leaders exult in the prospect of 
seeing a military despotism founded by the French Emperor 
in Mexico, notwithstanding their righteous abhorrence of the 
military despotism which they suppose to have been founded 
by Mr. Lincoln in the United States. Perhaps the French 
Emperor may have reason to wish that he had studied the 
signs of political death before he assumed that the American 
Commonwealth was dead. I am sanguine enough to believe 
that one result of this dreadful struggle will be to bar for 
the future all reactionary influences and enterprises of this 
kind, and to make the new world a new world indeed, — a 
world of new opportunities and new hopes for man. Eng- 
land — the English people at least — would be no loser by 
the change : for no sinister influence, no artificial connection 
which diplomacy can offer, is worth half so much to us as 
our natural alliance with that portion of our race which has 
the Western Continent for its dower. 

Next, you appeal to our commercial classes, w^hose inter- 
ests you say are involved in the recognition of the Slave 
Power. I am glad that you do not leave our commercial in- 
terests out of sight, and I trust you will bear them in mind 
when next the question of the Alabama and her consorts 
comes under consideration ; for it is difficult to imagine any- 
thing more detrimental to the interests of a commercial 
country, than the establishment of a principle under which 
even an inland power might wage a maritime war against 
us with impunity from neutral ports. There is in the Free 
States an evil tendency to give protection to native manu- 



48 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

f —^ — 

factures, from which the Slave States are free, because they 
have no manufactures to protect. We condemn this tendency 
as decidedly as you can, and perhaps with more consistency 
than noblemen and squires who a few years ago were resist- 
ing the repeal of the Corn Laws. But you have only to 
glance over economical history to see that it is the besetting 
sin, not of the Americans only, but of all new manufacturing 
countries. It is as strong in Canada as in the United States. 
The Americans are not wanting in shrewdness, and they 
will learn in time, like their neighbors, that Protection is a 
dead loss to the community, both in raising the price of com- 
modities, and in diverting industry from the more profitable 
to the less profitable employment. And then the only ques- 
tion for those who trade to America will be, in effect, as to 
the comparative productiveness of free and slave labor, — a 
question on which I abstain from entering, both because it is 
too extensive, and because, so far as I am aware, all econo- 
mists of eminence are on the same side. Meantime if you 
think that the immediate interests of commerce would be 
promoted by a great maritime war, with the sea swarming 
with privateers chartered by our reckless hatred of the 
North, Commerce, speaking by the mouth of her best repre- 
sentatives, appears to be of a different mind. 

From commercial we pass to moral considerations. " The 
struggle is one for independence on the part of the South, 
and for empire on the part of the North." The struggle on 
the part of the North, with deference to you, is not for em- 
pire, but for the maintenance of the existing Union, — a 
totally different thing in every point of view ; as we, if we 
had to put down a Repeal movement in Ireland, should very 
clearly perceive. I doubt whether the author of the dictum 
himself has failed to see the distinction since the battle of 
Gettysburg. But suppose the North were really fighting 
for empire. Are we the people to denounce and chastise 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE 'ASSOCIATION. 49 

them for that offence ? Sermons in favor of continence are 
very good things ; but they are a httle out of place when 
preached by Lovelace, and by Lovelace fresh from a house 
of ill-fame. We grasp, in addition to our colonies, English 
and conquered, and to our military dependencies, the whole 
of India ; we extend our rapacious arms to Burmah, and 
try to extend them to Cabul ; we annex, by robber's law, 
OiMle, Sattara, and Nagpore ; we bombard Canton to force 
a way for one set of our adventurers, and Kagosima to force 
a way for another ; we bayonet the last insurgent Sepoy in 
cold blood ; we deport the last Tasmanian to his island grave ; 
we baptize the Maories, exterminate them, and confiscate 
their land, and then we turn round, and with uplifted hands 
and eyes read Pharisaic lectures to our neighbors on the ex- 
ceeding wickedness of fighting for empire. And so with 
" humanity," which you urge as a motive for getting us into 
another war. When has " humanity " prevented the English, 
or any aristocratic or despotic government, from serving its 
own objects, however selfish, at the expense of human mis- 
ery and blood ? What say you to the crusade of our aris- 
tocracy against the French Revolution ? What say you to 
the diplomatic war in the Crimea ? Has not the name 
Peacemonger been as great a reproach here as it can be in 
America ? Why are not these republicans to be allowed to 
have their quarrels as well as kings and nobles ? This is 
the first M^ar for many a day in which the common soldier 
has been fighting for his own cause, and in which, if victo- 
rious, he will share the fruits of victory. Yet this is the 
first occasion, so far as 1 am aware, on which the voice of 
the English aristocracy and of the English clergy has been 
raised in favor of peace. The Bishop of my diocese called 
upon his people the other day to pray for peace in America ; 
that is, for the success of the rebellion. Full as the world 
has been, since he has held the see, of dreadful and unjust 

8 D 



50 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

wars, he never bade us pray for peace before, and I doubt 
whether he will ever bid us pray for peace again. Our re- 
sponsibilities are very extensive. But happily we are not 
answerable for the conduct of nations in America. We are 
not the censors of that continent, nor the arbiters of its des- 
tinies. Recent events ought to have convinced us that it is 
quite as much as we can do to remain arbiters of the desti- 
nies of Europe. Let us set an example of humanity inirf)ur 
proceedings, and we may be sure that the blood shed by 
great and independent Powers on the other side of the At- 
lantic will never be laid to our charge. Suppose that the 
North were likely to be guilty of holding the South as a 
"garrisoned dependency," — a result which it is preposterous 
to predict in the case of Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, and 
the States beyond the Mississippi, all of which have 'been 
wrested by the Federals from that which you somewhat 
loosely and fallaciously call the South, in the course of the 
war, — let us take care that we are not guilty of holding 
Ireland as a garrisoned dependency. A good deal of the 
labor which we expend in setting the whole world to rights 
would be more profitably expended in doing some acts of 
justice within a narrower sphere. 

Great Britain, you say, has been always ready to ac- 
knowledge a national uprising. That the British people 
have been ready to acknowledge and encourage national 
uprisings is true ; but so far as I am aware, the sentiment 
has not before extended with anything like its present force 
to the aristocracy and the clergy. The love of patriot insur- 
rection, if it has burned in the bosoms of those classes, has 
burned, till now, with a temperate flame. Italy, Hungary, 
Poland, Montenegro, have excited no such enthusiasm in 
aristocratic minds. The same may be said, I believe, of 
Greece ; and I am sure of Belgium ; — the two cases to 
which you specially appeal. The Christian nations crushed 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 51 

under the brutal sway of the Turks are left to the mercies 
of diplomacy without compunction. Venetia writhes be- 
neath the yoke of a foreign oppressor ; yet no aristocratic 
association is formed for her deliverance. The Times cele- 
brated with loud jubilation the triumphant entry of Ra- 
detsky into Milan, and it loses no safe opportunity of showing 
its hatred of Garibaldi, the great champion of nationality, 
who now, through some unaccountable delusion, which has 
led him to mistake his enemy's cause for his own, burns to 
be fighting upon the Federal side. This is no uprising of a 
nation. It is, and wiTT always be called in after times, the 
Revolt of the Slave-owners, who are trying to sweep away 
the laboring part of what you call an uprisen nation into 
irredeemable bondage, and who have forced their white 
dependents into their armies by ruthless conscriptions, even 
torturing British subjects, as our Government has expressly 
declared, to compel them to enlist in their ranks. If it had 
really been the uprising of a nation, it is doubtful whether 
you would have got together all the present members of 
your Association in support of the cause. 

You offer, if we will assist you in establishing a great 
Slave Power, to do your best to persuade the Slave-owners 
to abolish slavery. I mistrust the offer, — at least I object 
to going to war in reliance on it, — on two grounds, the 
logical position of those who are to persuade, and the inflex- 
ible resolution (as it seems to me) of those who are to be 
persuaded. In this very manifesto you avow that man can 
hold property in man ; departing therein from the prin- 
ciples of your country, which denies the existence of such 
property, and would set free at once, and in utter disre- 
gard of the alleged rights of the master, any Southern slave 
who touched her soil. Throughout this contest your party 
have endeavored by all means and by every kind of argu- 
ment, — Scriptural (of which the Times is a great master), 



52 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

political, and physiological, — both in public and in private, 
to undermine the morality of the people on this subject, and 
to infuse into them the belief that Slavery, though open 
to some objections, was not a wrong. Worst of all, the 
attempt has been made, from which your Address is not 
entirely free, to destroy the moral confidence, and lower the 
moral bearing of England on the question, by persuading 
her that she was herself still tainted with the guilt; as 
though, if she " bequeathed slavery " to the Americans, she 
had not also bequeathed to them the example of abolition, 
and that at no trifling cost ; and as though she were not 
yearly expending much money and not a few lives to put 
down the abominable traffic by which American slavery has 
been, and, if you can compass your object, will again be, 
fed. As to the Slave-owner, he is pouring out his blood and 
bringing ruin on his country for a cause which he has told 
us, in words which have made our ears to tingle, is the best 
on earth, — the cause of Slavery. And it has been justly 
said that, next to his fierce valor, the thing most worthy 
of respect about him is the haughty frankness with which 
he has avowed in the face of scandalized humanity his 
inhuman purpose, and spurned all the attempts of his more 
cautious advocates in this country to veil from the eyes of 
Englishmen the real object of the war. You talk in polite 
phrase of " servile labor," and " institutions distasteful to 
Englishmen " ; but Slavery — perpetual and unlimited — is 
the name which he flings in your teeth as well as in ours. 
Like Danton, he has looked his crime in the face and done 
it ; and his effrontery lends a kind of black majesty to his 
.cause. Perhaps, indeed, he was sagacious as well as bold, 
and knew that a fierce denial of the Rights of Labor, though 
it would of course be met with professions of dislike, might 
touch a fibre of latent sympathy in reactionary hearts. 
Overtures, it is believed, have been already made by some 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 53 

of jour party to the Slave Government on the subject of 
gradual emancipation : and it would be instructive, before 
any serious step is taken, to know what reception those 
overtures have met. But the truth is, that in your own 
manifesto you furnish the Slave-owner with an overwhelm- 
ing answer to any arguments, grounded on the moral evils 
of Slavery, which you can possibly address to him. By 
your own showing, Slavery, to your surprise and admiration, 
has produced nothing but public and private virtue ; while 
freedom has produced nothing but mendacity, cruelty, and 
corruption. " Cast away, then," the Slave-owner will say, 
" your English prejudices, however rooted they may be in 
your minds by unsound legislation and irrational tradition, 
and by your unwillingness to admit that your own eman- 
cipation of the slaves, so long your pride, was in fact an act 
of stupendous folly. Accept the decisive verdict of experi- 
ence, and. instead of truckling to an unsound public opinion 
by imitating with a faint heart and stammering lips the lan- 
guage of the friends of freedom, unite with us in propagat- 
ing an institution, the mother of every public and private 
virtue, not only over America, but over the world." 

Fail in your attempts to persuade the great Slave-owners 
that it is better for their interests to give up their slaves, and 
what will you have done by helping the Slave States to 
estabUsh their independence ? Will you have created an 
heroic republic, or an heroic community of any kind ? The 
military and administrative qualities which have been evoked 
by the struggle, and which you admit yourselves that you 
never perceived before the struggle, will cease to excite your 
admiration or to excuse your sympathy with the Slave-owner 
■vfhen the struggle is over. The d/scisive experience of his- 
tory shows us that the consequence of Slavery to a nation is 
death. You will have for a time perhaps continued displays 
of military energy in filibustering enterprises, for which, as 



54 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

Mexico and the West are cut off, the "West Indies seem to 
offer a convenient scene. But afterwards, what can you 
hope to have but the loathsome spectacle of corruption and 
decay, — a vast Cuba, without the qualifying element of 
fresh blood from Spain ? And the responsibility of this 
result will have been gratuitously brought by your efforts on 
a nation, Avhich, if it was once deeply tainted with the guilt 
of Slavery, has perhaps done more than any other nation to 
redeem the slave. 

Few people doubt that, if this war is allowed to run its 
course without interference, whatever may be its issue in 
other respects. Slavery will be abolished. The motives of 
the North for emancipating the slaves I once more decline 
to scrutinize. When there was a question as to our objects 
in insisting on the suppression of the slave-trade, Talleyrand 
said — and I have no doubt with truth — that he w^as the 
only man in France who believed that we were sincere. 
That a large and powerful party in the North at least was 
sincere, the Secession ordinances furnish, as was before said, 
irrefragable proof. Suppose the only motive of the North 
to be the military one of drawing off the laboring population 
which sustains the war : still, all men of sense who are hearty 
enemies of Slavery will be ready to welcome a great boon 
for humanity, through whatever accident it may be offered. 
We must not refuse to be saved from shipwreck because our 
preservers may have an eye to the salvage. Slavery was 
the bane and curse of that hemisphere ; and its poisonous 
influence was beginning, as we see, to extend to some classes 
in ours. Let us accept its abolition at the hand of Provi- 
dence, if we will not accept it at the hands of man. You 
think that emancipation would be better if effected by tile 
free will of the master, deliberately and in peace, than as it 
is now being effected, by violent means, suddenly, and amidst 
the confusion of a great war. I think so too ; but I know 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 55 

that it is being effected in one way, and that it never would 
be effected in the other. And after all, unstatesmanlike as 
it may appear, if the negro will work for wages, as there 
seems so far reason to think that he will, there is no better 
way of emancipating him than to set him free. Incidentally 
the war has proved very favorable in the highest sense to 
the work of Emancipation, since it has led to the enlistment 
of large numbers of negroes as soldiers in the Federal 
armies, and has thereby perhaps done more than could have 
been done within any calculable period, by any other agency, 
to break through prejudice, and raise the social condition of 
the long degraded race.* The Emancipation Proclamation 

* " The circumstances attending the departure of the Twenty-second 
Infantry, a negro regiment, raised by the Union League Club here, for the 
seat of war, three days ago, were a remarkable illustration of the strength 
and rapidity of the tide of antislavery sentiment. Last July it was for 
nearly a whole week dangerous for a negro to show.his face in the streets; 
it is even at this moment dangerous for one to venture into some of the 
Irish quarters ; and when last autumn a colored regiment, raised in Mas- 
sachusetts, was passing through New York on its way South, and it was 
proposed that it should march down Broadway, the plan was abandoned 
on the recommendation of Mr. Kennedy, the superintendent of police, 
who said that if it were attempted he could not be answerable for the 
peace of the city. The war feeling and the antislavery feeling have been 
rising so fiercely, however, ever since that time, that when the Twenty- 
second was about to take its departure, it was arranged, not simply that 
it should march down Broadway, but that there should be a public pre- 
sentation of colors to it from the ladies in Union Squai'e. I walked down 
to Fourteenth Street, to see the regiment march down from their quarters 
at Pike's Island, on their way to the square in which the presentation 
was to take place. The square itself, and the parts of Fourteenth Street 
bordering on it, the doorsteps, and lower balconies, and the sidewalks, 
and all parts of the streets not kept clear by the police, were crowded 
with colored people. I never saw a tenth part of the number collected 
together, and doubt if so many have ever been seen in one place at one 
time in the North before. The excitement amongst them seemed to be 
intense; but I am bound to say that so orderly, well-dressed, and clean a 
crowd I have never seen anywhei*e, though I have seen many ci'owds in 
various countries. The women, in particular, were very well and neatly 
dressed, and had a most respectable look, in the best sense of the word. 



56 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

, 4t — . 

was to produce a servile war with all its horrors, in spite of 
the affectionate relations which at other times we are told 
subsist between the masters and the slaves : but these ghastly- 
visions have at least yielded to the sense of reality, and those 
who cherish them are now tired of shrieking in that key. 

But I am not sure that I have not been wasting your 
time and my own in going through the paragraphs of your 
Address. I suspect that the arguments set forth in it affect 
the minds of the majority of your party little more than 
they affect ours. It is not a legal theory as to the rights of 
St-ates under the American Constitution, — it is not a specu- 
lative view as to the differences of character and interest 
between the people of Richmond and the people of Wash- 
ington, — it is not admiration of the Southerners, of whom, 
as I said before, so long as they remained in the Union, 



The crowd was so dense that at some points it was only by great exei-tion 
that it was possible to make one's way through, and I Avas frequently 
hemmed in for some minutes, but I am satisfied I have never seen any 
collection of members of the ' superior race ' in New York close contact 
with which v/ould not have been ten times more offensive than with this 
conf^regation of ' niggers.' A New York Irish crowd of the same size, in 
the same place, would have been unapproachable by anybody with the 
use of his nose left him, and retaining an ordinary regard for the safety 
of his skull and ribs. When the regiment marched round the corner 
from Fourteenth Street, the band playing and colors flying, the enthusi- 
asm of their friends passed all bounds. One mulatto woman standing 
near me looked on eagerly for a few minutes, and then burst into tears, 
and all along the line, as far as I could see, white handkerchiefs were be- 
ing shaken frantically by thousands of sable arms. They marched very 
st-eadily, in heavy order, and were generally of very fine physique, — 
finer, I think, than the average of white regiments, and there was much 
greater equality amongst them in age. Many of them were of huge pro- 
portion. I noticed two or three sergeants tall enough and brawny enough 
for Barnum's Museum. Their Aveak point was the handling of their mus- 
kets, which were badly carried and clumsily shifted ; but I learned that 
they had only been furnished to them ten days previously, so that they 
had had little time for drill. The officers are all white, and have been 
selected for this regiment with great care. Many of the captains seemed 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 57 

nothing was too abominable to be believed, — it is not a de- 
sire to bestow on Central America the blessings of separate 
nationalities and the balance of power, — it is not a romantic 
affection for Free Trade and a passionate abhorrence of 
Protection, — it is not a newly -born though laudable sense 
of the wickedness of fighting for empire, — it is not an en- 
thusiasm, if not newly-born, new in its intensity, for the 
cause of insurgent nations, — it is not a fear lest Slavery 
should be extinguished in any manner but the most states- 
manlike and the most conducive to the highest interests of 
the negro : — it is not any one of these things, nor the 
whole of them put together, that has kindled among the 
reactionary party in this country a passionate and almost 
frantic excitement of feeling, such as has not been wit- 
nessed among the same party since the war against the 

very j'oung; but the field officers are, I believe, all West-Pointers, and 
have seen service. In front of the Union League Club a platform had 
been erected, and from this an address to the regiment was delivered by 
Charles King, the president of Columbia College, and a stand of colors 
was presented on behalf of a body of ladies belonging to ' the best society.' 
Bouquets were flung to the officers : the colonel led in three cheers for the 
club and the ladies, and they then marched down Broadway amidst a 
general huzzaing and waving of handkerchiefs along the whole route. 
The marching of the men during this part of the progress was very fine, — 
steadjr, vigorous, and correct. They wore the United States blue and 
white leggings. You see the world moves, after all. I saw two respect- 
able-looking colored men shake hands as the regiment moved off from 
Union Square, one asking: ' Well, what do you think of this? ' ' I like 
it; I like it,' was the reply; ' and I thank God I 've lived to see it.' As 
regards the value of these troops for military purposes, I may mention 
that General Seymour, who commanded at the late battle in Florida, is 
an officer of the regular army, and has been a very virulent proslavery 
man, full of contempt for negroes, says, in a letter to a friend in New 
York, speaking of the affair of Olustie: ' The colored troops fought splen- 
didly, magnificently. One fellow, a color-sergeant in his regiment, stood 
holding the colors of his regiment until he stood almost alone, and then 
he fell covered with wounds.' " — New York Correspondent of the Daily 
News, March 23, 1864. 
3* 



58 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

French Revolution ; that has caused the special organs of 
these classes in the press actually to foam with fury, and to 
forget the interests as well as the duties of journalism in 
their attempts to keep on a level with the passions of their 
readers ; that has made the legislators of a great 'maritime 
and commercial country hail with loud cheers the success of a 
precedent rendering every neutral port a basis of operations 
for our enemy in time of war ; that has incited members of 
the British House of Peers to stand forth publicly and avow 
themselves leaders of a league having for its object the 
" disruption " of a friendly nation, allied by recent treaties, 
and bound by common objects of public morality to our 
own ; that has thrown the Conservative party in this coun- 
try into the arms of the Democratic mob of New York ; 
and that has led men careful of their character to face the 
finger of suspicion, which will always be pointed at the aris- 
tocratic allies of the Slave-owning aristocracy of the South. 
History will not mistake the meaning of the loud cry of 
triumph which burst from the hearts of all who openly or 
secretly hated liberty and progress, at the fall, as they fondly 
supposed, of the Great Republic. How senseless that cry 
was ; how absurdly mistaken they who raised it were in 
thinking that the rupture between Slavery and Free La- 
bor was the effect of republican institutions, and betokened 
their ruin, matters little : the source of the joy which rang out 
in it was not doubtful. It has sunk now to a lower and less 
jubilant tone. The Commonwealth, the first hour of weak- 
ness being past, has put forth a power and displayed re- 
sources which have astonished not only her enemies, but her 
friends ; and it seems as though, after one bright glimpse of 
hope for Slavery, the evil spirit of Freedom were about to 
prevail in the world once more. That issue, fraught, as it 
is imagined, with fearful consequences, can now, apparently, 
be averted only by dragging England into the war upon 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 59 

the Southern side. And this may yet be accomplished. 
It will be accomplished, without a shadow of doubt, if the 
rams escape from the Mersey, and proceed to prey from an 
English port on American trade. The more vehement 
members of your party see their opportunity, and are trying 
to take advantage of it ; while your great organ in the press 
labors earnestly to keep up the mutual exasperation which, 
if a dispute should take place, would render a peaceful solu- 
tion almost hopeless. But before you, the great friends of 
'' humanity," from whom we have had such impressive hom- 
ilies on the horrors of war, plunge us into a war with Amer- 
ica, think twice whether it is wise for you, looking to your 
own interest, to do so. For, depend upon it, if you make a 
mistake, it will be one of the most serious kind. 

The minds of some, no doubt, are still full of the recollec- 
tion of the crusade against the French Republic : and they 
think perhaps that the same game might be played with 
success again. But in those days. Parliament being unre- 
formed, the Tory aristocracy, and their ecclesiastical confed- 
erates, had absolute command of the nation. It signified 
nothing what blunders were committed, or what disasters 
were encountered, — what armies were lost under the Duke 
of York in Flanders, or what fleets were driven to mutiny 
at the Nore by reckless corruption and mismanagement, — 
what financial burdens were imposed upon the country. The 
mass of the public were almost as passive instruments in the 
hands of the dominant class, though under the form of a 
free constitution, as the American slaves are in the hands 
of their masters. Moreover, the lower classes were so sunk 
in ignorance, that it was easy to work upon their passions, 
and to persuade them that the French, their ancient enemies, 
were coming to cut off their ears and noses, and to force 
them to eat frogs instead of bread. The taxation was grind- 
ing ; but the misery to which the people were reduced only 



60 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

made them the more willing to enlist : and those by whom, 
and for whose objects the taxes were imposed, got the greater 
part of their own payments back in the shape of the high 
rents and high tithes produced by the protection which the 
war gave to home-grown corn, and were further indemnified 
by sharing among them a vast patronage both in Church 
and State. The wealthy merchants who supported the 
Government also prospered, through the monopoly of com- 
merce secured to them by a war in which we were com- 
pletely masters of the sea, — a monopoly most injurious to 
the helpless many, but very profitable to the influential few. 
Any fiscal burdens which would really have entailed sacri- 
fices on the holders of political power were thrown off upon 
posterity. Toryism was absolutely in the ascendant, and all 
incovenient aspirations, all thoughts of political or social 
reform, were for the time eflfectually extinguished by the 
fury of the war. 

I do not say that you would not be able to do the same 
thing again : but I say that it is doubtful whether you would 
be able, and that the question deserves your deliberate con- 
sideration. We have not yet got a Free Parliament, but we 
have a Parliament very far less enslaved than the Parliament 
of Pitt, and one which, in case of miscarriage and suffering, 
may become, as it did even in the Crimean war, the organ 
of discontent. There is far more intelligence and political 
activity than there then was among the working classes in 
the towns, and these men are, for the most part, as well 
aware that the cause of those who are fighting for the rights 
of labor are theirs, as any nobleman in your Association can 
be that the other cause is his. Our peasantry are of course 
still very ignorant on political questions : but they have no 
natural antipathy to the Americans ; they would not be so 
easily persuaded that the Americans were coming to cut off 
their noses and make them eat frogs : perhaps it has begun 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 61 

to dawn upon them that, if there is any danger of being 
forced to eat frogs, it arises from a different quarter : and 
emigration is now turning the thoughts of the more adventu- 
rous of them away from the army, in which I beHeve they 
are with some difficulty brought to enlist, -jr a serious con- 
sideration, since the noblemen of your Committee will not go 
to war, except in a metaphorical sense, and you must still 
fight your battles with plebeian blood. As to Ireland, you 
would have to hold it, in the plain language of the Duke of 
Wellington, as a conquered country : and I need not say that 
the Americans possess far greater power of working on dis- 
affection there than were possessed by the French, more 
especially as the priests were opposed to the alliance with 
the French, whom they regarded as the enemies of their 
religion. Nor perhaps are the men of rank who head your 
Committee hkely to allow enough for the actual connection 
between a great number of families of the laboring class 
on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. " Burn down New 
York ! " said a laboring man the other day ; " New York is 
the home of my two brothers and my married sister!" 
There was no difficulty of this kind in the French war. The 
safety-valve of emigration, which carries off a very explosive 
force from Ireland, will be closed, and the explosive force 
will accumulate at home. You have most of the great mer- 
chants on your side, so far as sympathy is concerned : but 
they begin to feel that they would be called upon to undergo 
sacrifices such as only very strong sympathy will endure in a 
war in which we could not expect to be absolute masters of 
the sea : and our commerce, since its great extension, and its 
wide ramification under the system of free trade, has become 
far more sensitive than it was in the time of Pitt. The 
national debt would scarcely bear addition, and you would 
have to lay upon the country a burden of taxation which 
nothing could render tolerable but victory. It is unpatriotic 



62 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER OF THE 

to magnify the powers of an antagonist : but it is prudent to 
measure them, and I can scarcely imagine any one doubting 
that the powers of our antagonist on this occasion would be 
such as to insure us a long war, more especially as the seat 
of action would probably be fixed, very much to our disad- 
vantage, on tlie Canadian frontier, at a great distance from 
our base, and inaccessible to reinforcements during a great 
part of the year. These are not the days of Bull's Run, 
when Pennsylvanian regiments were marching away from 
the sound of the cannon. Adversity, as I said before, has 
done its work ; and the feeble braggart, as he once appeared, 
stands before you a strong and truly formidable man. The 
force and genius of the American nation has by this time 
been fairly thrown into war; its best men, selected by a 
process terribly searching, are at the head of its armies ; and 
those armies are composed of soldiers whose blood and 
sinews are British, who form in the British line, and go into 
action with the British cheer. Probably there are almost as 
many men of British birth under arms in America as there 
are in England. But that which appears to me, who am in- 
capable of forming a judgment on military questions, most 
formidable in the American Commonwealth, supposing that 
its destruction is your object in the war, is that, as I said at 
the outset, I suspect that this Great Community of labor 
bears in it, with all its faults, something not uncared for in 
the councils of Providence, and which Providence will not 
let die. 

Therefore, before you let out the rams, consider the chances 
of the game, and think whether the stake is really worth the 
hazard of the throw. It is true, no doubt, that if the Ameri- 
can Commonwealth survives and prospers, its example may 
in the end affect the political and social system of this coun- 
try. But the operation of this influence is probably as yet 
very remote ; and you may feel pretty confident that the con- 



SOUTHERN INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 63 

vulsive effort of this war, and the vast expenditure entailed 
by it, will be followed by a period of collapse and financial 
perplexity, sufficient to guarantee you against contagion for 
some years to come. Meantime, I am not sure that America 
does not contribute, as a safety-valve, to your security more 
than she adds to your peril as an example of prosperous 
freedom. Even in the time of Charles I. it is not improba- 
ble that the crisis would have arrived earlier, but for the out- 
let afforded to Puritan discontent by the New England col- 
ony, and the prospect which that colony held out to those 
who remained behind of a deliverance from Charles and 
Laud, independent of revolution : so that you may be repeat- 
ing, under another form, the folly which the reactionary 
Government of those days committed when they stopped 
the vessel full of Puritan emigrants in the Thames. Your 
real danger, if danger it be, lies nearer home. The aris- 
tocracy of this country, as an exclusive and hereditary branch 
of the national Legislature, is almost, if not quite, left alone 
in Europe. The jpudal tenure of property, with primogeni- 
ture and entail, is very fast disappearing in every European 
country but ours. Long before American institutions will have 
had time seriously to infect us, our nobility will be called upon, 
upon more direct and, pressing grounds, to show that the con- 
tinuance of a system essential to the existence of their order 
on its present footing is also compatible with the economical, 
social, and moral interests of the people. Nor can I imagine 
that the success of Free Religion (supposing it to be suc- 
cessful) on the other side of the Atlantic can be a source of 
rational apprehension to the Established Church comparable 
in magnitude to the theological convulsions which are already 
tearing her vitals here. All these questions, and that of the 
enfranchisement of the people, may yet be settled, as every 
right-minded man, however desirous of reform, would wish 
them to be settled, by calm discussion, tranquilly and arnica- 



64 A LETTER TO A WHIG MEMBER, ETC. 

■ _a 

bly, in the common interest of all classes and orders in the 
nation. But if you persist in your present course, and attain 
the end towards which you are now driving, they will per- 
haps be settled by political struggles which, like those pro- 
duced by the reviving desire of Reform after the peace of 
1815, will bring us to the verge of civil war. 

Remember, in conclusion, that it is only an honest neu- 
trality which we ask. "We ask no aid, direct or indirect, for 
the Federals. "We do not deprecate the strict enforcement 
against them of all the laws of war, in case they should do 
anything contrary to our obhgations as neutrals. "We con- 
demned the outrage on the Trent, and supported the demand 
for redress as cordially as you did : though we did not think 
that the communication from the American Government, 
assuring us of an amicable solution, ought to have been 
suppressed. "We do not even deprecate war, disastrous and 
fratricidal as it would be, if the Federals refuse to respect 
our rights or our honor. "What we ask is, that you w^ill not 
abet the Southerns as you are now aborting them, in the 
attempt to drag us, by means of these piratical vessels, or 
by any other means, into an unjust and dishonorable war. 
If you do, and if, in the war which ensues, you fail speedily 
and decisively to crush the American- Commonwealth, you 
may give, though in an evil way and before the hour, a great 
impulse to political and social progress here. 

I am, &c., 

GOLDWm SMITH. 



Cambridge : Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co. 



LETTER 



TO 



A WHIG MEMBER OF THE SOUTHERN 
INDEPENDENCE ASSOCIATION. 



By GOLDWIN SMITH. 




BOSTON: 
TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 

18 6 4. 



THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, 

A 

MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS, 

IS UNIVKRSALLY RECOGNIZED AS THE 

BEST AMERICAN MAGAZINE. 



THE THIRTEENTH VOLUME 

Of the Atlantic commences with the number for January, 1864. Its com- 
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The prosperity of the Atlantic enables its conductors to employ the most 
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C. C. Hazew^ell, 

T. W. HiGGINSON, 

Author of '' Margret Howth," 
Mrs. Julia W. Howe, 
Mrs. a. D. T. Whitney, 
T. Buchanan Reab, 
Oliver Wendell Holmes, 
John G. Whittier, 
Gail Hamilton, 
E. P. Whipple, 
Bayard Taylor, 
Charles E. Norton, 
Francis Parkman, 



John G. Palfrey, 
George S. Hillard, 
Henry Giles, 
Walter Mitchell, 
Henry T. Tuckerman, 
John Weiss, 
Francis Wayland, Jr., 
William Cullen Bryant, 
Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 
Harriet Martineau, 
" Ik Marvel," 
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J. T. Trowbridge, 
JosiAH P. auiNCY, 
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MR. LONGFELLOW'S NEW VOLUME. 



The recent publication of Mr. Longfellow's new work may justly be 
regarded as one of the most important events in the literature of the year. 
The work itself is pronounced by competent critics the most finished pro- 
duction of the poet's genius. 

TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN, 

AND OTHER POEMS. 
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

1 vol. 16mo. $ 1.25. 
Handsomely bound in muslin, bevelled boards, and gilt top. 

D:^ Sent, postpaid, to any address on receipt of the price, by the pub- 
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135 Washington St., Boston. 



THE GREAT BATTLE BOOK. 



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My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field. 

BY " CARLETON." 

1 vol. 12mo. Profusely illustrated with Engravings, Maps, and Diagrams. 

S 1.00. 

The object of this book is to tell the youth of America, in plain and 
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THE CA USES OF THE REBELLION; 
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who are now upholding the national cause by fighting 

THE BATTLES OF THEIR COUNTRY. 

With this view, the author has given authentic and vivid descriptions of 
some of the most important battles of the war, drawn from his own per- 
sonal observations, and has thus made his work at once an absobbino 
NAURATivE and a truthful histort of the war. 

All parents who desire their sons to have a clear and distinct idea of the 
nature of the struggle through which the country is passing, should buy 
this book. " OAnLETON," the author, is well known as one of the best and 
most reliable of the army correspondents. 

O" A copy sent, joos^/jaifl?, to any address on receipt of One Dollar, 
by the publishers, 

TICKNOR & FIELDS, Boston. 



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